


twenty-one circulations

by lumailia



Category: RWBY
Genre: Angst, Beacon Days, F/M, Flirting, Gen, I luv Raven, Implied Sexual Content, Makeouts, Multichapter, Phoenix on the side, Qrow and Summer centric, STRQ is a lil wild, STRQ origin, Summer and Tai are in love with some Idiot Birds, Summer is an overachiever, Tai Is The Father, Team STRQ - Freeform, em dash abuse, i'm mean to qrow, mention of alcohol abuse, mild to moderate spicy incoming, some suggestive dialogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-09-01 14:27:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 52,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16766935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lumailia/pseuds/lumailia
Summary: a gift, a curse, and a love that was doomed from the startORtwenty-one vignettes about qrow branwen and summer rose





	1. circulations 1-3

**Author's Note:**

> WOO HELLO I have wanted to write a STRQ/flown north fic for AGES and I have been slowly typing away at this one since late Octoberish. That said, it's actually almost done, so updates will come fairly quickly (though the next one probably won't be until after I'm done with my finals next Friday). There's a lot I'm trying to pack in here, and a lot of it is pure speculation, like Summer's weapons, semblance, and personality, but I've been having a lot of fun with it. I have a wild dream that the next RWBY YA announced with Scholastic will be a STRQ spinoff so I can cry onto my physical copy. Anyway, if you like my work and want to stay up-to-date on when I'm dropping the next chapter, hit me up on Twitter @lumailia

_circulation /suhr-kyoo-LAY-shun/_

  1. _the act of sending goods or information from one person or place to another_



“You’re embarrassing yourself, little brother.”

Raven pins his cloak to the ground with the tip of her sword and his chest with the sole of her boot, her red lips split in a vicious grin. It’s all Qrow can see of her. With the sun above their heads, her bangs turn the rest of her face to jagged-edged shadows, dark as their feather-black hair.

He doesn’t have the strength to fight back. This is his fourth loss since dawn, and if Raven had her way, she’d batter him around until sunset—or at least until another challenger surfaced from the camp. But nothing beats the satisfaction of winning against her twin brother. _Twin,_ he’s always reminding her _._ She’s only thirteen minutes older, but she wields the gap like a second blade.

“All tuckered out?” she taunts, turning her sword lazily in her hand.

“Remove your foot, please.”

She digs the toe of her boot harder into his sternum, pushing a yelp from his lungs. “What was that?”

He reaches up and fastens his hand around her ankle. Grips tight. “Foot. Off.”

With a reluctant buzz of her lips, she steps off of him and sheathes her sword. Sunlight blazes down the metal like a solar flare.

Qrow jabs his chest gently with his finger, just to make sure all his ribs are intact, and rolls slowly to his feet. By the time he’s up, Raven has already assumed her neutral stance of a popped hip and crossed arms, her grin now evened to a tight-lipped smirk. 

“I guess I shouldn’t have expected a helping hand,” Qrow says as he brushes off his pants.

“Awh, don’t get too cut up about it,” Raven says. “Pretty soon, we’ll have teammates for that.”

“You on a team?” he laughs. “That’s going to be a sight.”

“They’ll like me because I’m useful,” she says. “You ought to try being the same.”

She bends down and grabs the handle of Harbinger, his scythe. Reluctantly, she tosses it to him, and he cinches it into sword form before holstering it to his back.

“Thanks, sis.”

They start towards the crimson steeples of the camp’s main tent—their home, at least for the past few months the Branwen tribe has been stationed in this enclave of Mistral. Tomorrow, they will leave it, starting their journey for the shining towers and sprawling courtyards of Beacon Academy in Vale. It’s where the best fighters in Remnant learn to be Huntsmen and Huntresses, slayers of Grimm and heroes of humanity.

And it’s the best place to learn how to kill them.

For the Branwen clan, Huntsmen are more than just a problem: their righteous gunslinging has stopped far too many of the raids they rely on to survive, and Leader Carian wants to cut them down. But the tribe, for all its literacy in survival, for all the villages plundered and civilians slashed at the throat, lacks the skills to face off against a professional Huntsmen. Those who’ve tried have come home vanquished, mottled in blood and bruises—if they’ve come home at all.

Hope, however, lives in the form of Carian’s children. Two months ago, she sent the twins into the city of Mistral for their entrance exams, and a week later, they returned to the camp with acceptance to the best of the best. For once, all their sibling’s quarrels had proved useful.

Leader Carian isn’t often proud of them, but on the day they came back with their letters, Qrow won’t forget the way she smiled.

At his side, Raven is confident in her step, glowing off the rush of her victories. If she’s feeling any anxiety about their journey tomorrow, she’s either forcing it down, or channeling it all into her sparring. Perhaps his own nerves are what’s made him unable to dodge her sword; he’s always been the feeler of the two of them. He’d never admit it aloud, but sometimes, he wishes he could barter just a sliver of his heart for a bit of her strength.

Raven slows their pace as they near the tent. Reluctance bends her posture. “I’m on lunch duty today,” she says. “You should take the extra free time to practice.”

“Yes, Mother.”

She thins her eyes at him, giving him a good, lingering glare before tucking back the door to the tent and slipping inside.

He snickers to himself. He’s not going to train—he’s going to find a nice, cozy spot on the edge of camp and take a nap.

It’s a quiet Thursday, but a few clan members still pass him as he heads past the tents and towards the gardens where they grow their vegetables. They stare, but he’s used to it. There’s no mistaking he and Raven are the Tribe Leader’s children, with their bloodred eyes and smoke-colored hair and skin like shards of the moon; whoever their father was, none of him shows in their faces. But there’s a difference between the way they look at Raven and the way they look at him. Raven demands reverence, awe, submission.

He’s just the boy with the curse.

Qrow sets down his weapon and drapes himself along on a slope of mossy rock. It’s not the most comfortable place to fall asleep, but the sun is warm on his limbs and cheeks, and he’s far enough away from his sister and mother to actually relax, if only for a few minutes before Raven drags him in for lunch, one last time.

He stares up into the trees, their dark leaves spread like a cloak over the perimeter of the camp, and swears he can see tiny white blossoms in them.

+

Just before midnight, Raven steps into Qrow’s corner of the tent. Lantern light burnishes the planes of her face, making her ghostly pale skin appear almost warm. She doesn’t say anything—only looms, impatient. Usually, if Qrow ignores her, she’ll go away, but she stands firm before the lantern at his bedside, insisting to be seen.

Qrow closes his book. “Can I help you?”

She hesitates. Her throat bobs with a heavy swallow, and Qrow’s eyes tighten on the motion. Something is wrong.

“Raven?” he asks, tentatively.

Another swallow, then an answer: “I’m scared.” She says it in a whisper, as if she speaks any louder, her breaths will extinguish the light.

Qrow cinches his brow. An admission of fear is more than just out of character for his sister—he used to admire her, before she became a constant pain in his ass, because he believed she was fearless. But her anxiety tonight is real. Palpable. He can see it in the tiny tremors in her fingers, the way her shoulders aren’t pushed quite as far back as usual.

“Me too,” is all he says. He doesn’t know what to offer her but the truth.

For a flicker, the understanding hangs in the air. Then Raven, seeming at ease in her confession, recedes into the shadows.

  1. _the movement of blood through the body_



Summer Rose stretches her calves along the floor of the Emerald Forest, working out the lingering tension from her fall. She knows you’re generally not supposed to land feet-first after rocketing off a cliff, but she couldn’t help it—today just might be the biggest day of her life. Who could blame her for wanting a running start?

But now she’s just sitting, trying her best to ignore the cold sensation of dew seeping through her tights while her aura finishes the job of healing her legs.

For most of the other students in her class, finding their partner during initiation is just another fun, first-week challenge, a way to hand things over to fate for a while, like a lottery. But Summer doesn’t have time for any games. She has a strategy, and she can’t afford to let it go wrong.

Her acceptance to Beacon came on the heels of what she knew was a poor performance. She slipped during the physical exam, giving her sore ribs and deep purple bruises that took nearly a day to heal. Her opponents in the combat round were stronger than she’d been trained for at Signal, and her maneuvers with Cress and Lune, her scabbards, were sloppy at best. She considered it a miracle she’d even passed, and was fully prepared to be chosen for one of the lower-ranked schools, like Shade or Haven. As she walked to retrieve her results, she kept her silver eyes pinched closed, trying to imagine herself in one of their uniforms after so many years of dreaming in Beacon’s red and gold.

But when Professor Ozpin, headmaster of Beacon Academy, sat her down in that empty classroom at Signal—mere feet from the gym where she took her exams—he insisted she was special. That it was Beacon, not any other Academy, that could see her to her strongest.

Her heart shot to her toes. “Are you for real?” she blurted. Excitement swallowed any capacity she might’ve had to contain her thoughts.

“I am,” said Ozpin. “You are an exceptional talent, Miss Rose.”

“But my scores…”

“Are only a number,” he said. “You fought well. Your technique is agile, sharp, deliberate. You show early mastery of your semblance. Your written scores were the best we received this year. What you lack, Miss Rose, is confidence.”

“You don’t think I’m confident?” Summer asked, all joy draining from her face.

“I know you’re not. You pre-calculate too much. You treat every battle like a mathematics test because you’re afraid of your own instincts. It’s a…common trend, among advanced students like yourself,” he said. He reached beneath the desk and pulled out his cane, held it parallel to the desk with a single hand.

“Grab onto the cane, Miss Rose,” he said.

Without a second thought, she obeyed. Where his hand was steady on the cane, hers trembled.

“To be sure in your grip, you have to be sure of yourself,” he said. He drew the cane away, setting it against his chair, and Summer tucked her hand into her lap. She wrung her fingers together, a habit her grandmother told her would make the skin around her knuckles bloat with age, but she couldn’t help it. The exam was over, she’d received acceptance to the school of her dreams, yet under Ozpin’s dark, dissecting gaze, she was still irrevocably nervous.

“I think you’ll find a Beacon education of great help to you, in that respect,” Ozpin continued. “At your initiation, you’ll want to make sure you find a strong partner. Someone who can bolster you, but also temper you. It’s never perfect, but I always pick the teams with the hope they can fill each other’s gaps.”

_Fill each other’s gaps, fill each other’s gaps,_ Summer repeats to herself, over and over, as she finally crawls to her feet and begins her trek through the forest.

She’s going to find Taiyang. He was one of her old sparring partners at Signal—not her most frequent, but one of the most reliable. Besides, it’ll be good to have a familiar face around. Beyond a handful of Signal grads across four different grades, Beacon’s student body will be all strangers. 

The trees rustle nearby. Summer jerks her head towards the source of the noise, looking for movement, but finds only stillness. She sets her jaw and keeps walking. Tai knows he’s supposed to meet up with her. They made an agreement _,_ days before they boarded the ship to Vale: if she runs into someone who isn’t him, she runs the other way. Which is, supposedly, against the rules. But this is her future at stake, here. Now is a good a time as any to test them.

Another rustle comes, louder this time. She ignores it and keeps on her forward path. The woods are still thick here, the grass up to her ankles, but this way seems lead to a clearing—she can see brushstrokes of sunlight up ahead, beaming down to the forest floor.

Offbeat footsteps, softly plodding on the grass, join the rustling at Summer’s back.

“Tai?” she calls. “Taiyang?”

Her follower doesn’t answer, which means they probably aren’t Tai. Before her curiosity can bid her to turn around, making the fatal eye contact that seals a partnership, she waves a hand behind her and sprints to the left, into the dark embrace of the trees.

Summer calls her semblance Lunar Year. Her surroundings, her enemies—she can slow all of them at her command, while she fights in real-time. She explained it to Tai, once, as the opposite of super-speed.

Once she’s sure she’s lost her pursuer, Summer slows her gait. Off the path, sunlight makes it to the forest floor in nothing more than tiny freckles, almost like stars. The brush rises nearly to her knees, the sharper grasses sticking to her tights with each step. She’ll get back on course, eventually, once the coast is clear, but for now, she’ll have to wade through the shadows.

A low growl moves the trees. Summer fastens her fingers around the hilts of her scabbards and keeps walking, resolute. Of course there would be Grimm in these woods. But it’s nothing she can’t handle. Ozpin wouldn’t launch them straight into danger on their first day of school, would he?

Darkness rises over her, blotting out what little light reaches the forest floor. There’s another growl, and hot breath bristles up her cloak to the back of her neck, puckering her skin with goosebumps. Her pulse echoes in her ears.

_Focus, Summer. You are going to be a Huntress. You can handle this._

Summer whirls on her heels. Her opponent is a massive Beowulf, teeth dripping with shadows, eyes burning violent yellow in its skull. It blows another breath, this time over her face, making her eyes sting. She fixes her hands on her scabbards, but they shake.

The Beowulf lunges for her. She raises a hand, power warming her veins. Streaks of silver, even and fluid as rain, lance over the Beowulf’s body, slowing it to a near crawl. She draws her first scabbard, Cress, and activates the mid-range extension. Clenching her teeth, she rears back to strike—

—and then a crescent of blinding steel slices through the Beowulf’s neck, severing its head from its body. The head falls at Summer’s feet. Mouth agape, she watches its eyes shrink to pinpoints before the whole Grimm crumples to fine, black dust.

Wind siphons through the trees. The dust scatters. Silver eyes meet low-burning red.

The boy before Summer is not Taiyang. He’s taller. Leaner. He wears a fitted gray shirt, the first few buttons left open at the top, with slender black pants and boots with squared toes. A red cape hangs off his shoulders, billows against his hips. Even in the shadows, there’s a glow about him, like moonlight.

Summer’s heart slams against her ribcage, and she doesn’t know if it’s because she’s messed up her entire plan, or because the boy who just saved her is every bit the tall, dark, handsome stranger her grandmother always warned her about.

_Get it together, Summer,_ she chides herself. _He’s still a teenaged boy. He probably forgot to pack deodorant._

The boy grins, bracing the handle of his scythe confidently on his shoulders, and her stomach does a full somersault.

This time, she doesn’t even bother to use her semblance before she bolts.

+

It’s not like Qrow expected his luck to be any better in Vale.

Raven was supposed to portal to them the second they hit the ground. Everything would be easier with them as partners. They would be sent on duo missions together, where they could reconnect with the tribe, exchange information, maybe even dust if they could hit the school supply without being caught. But the minutes stretched on, and Raven never showed, and when he saw the Beowulf trailing that girl, he decided that if he needed a hero reputation to mask his true motives, now was the time to start building it. 

And now she’s gone. He barely got a word in, barely got a look at her, before she took off without so much as a “thank you.”

Plucky Beacon girls—he could already see Raven getting in a fight with this one.

He finds her again not far from where she left him, leaning winded against a tree. Her back is turned, her legs hidden by the brush. With the white cloak draped over her back, she reminds him of the wraiths the tribe elders would tell stories about, the ghosts of heartbroken women doomed to wander the forest forever, wailing after their lost loves.

“Hey there, Quicksilver,” he says. He’s not sure where the name comes from—because she’s fast, probably. But mostly because it feels right.

She turns, right into a pool of dappled sunlight. Her pink face is scrunched, her cherry lips pulled down in a scowl. Dark reddish hair flops over one eye, but the other gleams silver-white in the sunshine, like a flash from the barrel of a gun. He should say something else, introduce himself, but he’s caught on the delicate contour of her jaw, the even slope of her nose, that one brilliant silver eye framed in thick, dark lashes.

She’s beautiful. And like most beautiful girls he’s encountered in his life, she’s pissed at him.

“I could’ve handled that Grimm myself,” she says. She moves away from the tree and places her hands indignantly on her hips.

“Yet you didn’t have to,” Qrow counters. “In fact, I think I’m due some thanks for my service.”

“You know, you don’t have to be my partner, if you don’t want to.”

He looks at her quizzically. “Um, I think that’s against the rules. What did old four-eyes say again, something about locking eyes, sealing the partnership? Because if we didn’t hit that line back there, we sure have crossed it now.”

“I was looking for someone else.”

“So was I,” he says, then adds with a knowing smirk, “Just our luck.”

She spends a moment on his confession, arms now crossed pensively over her chest. He’s not going to push her—if she wants to run away and break the rules, he’ll let her. He’ll just have to hope Raven ends up on his team, anyway. There’s no way to know for sure, but he figures the only reason she didn’t portal to him was because she found someone else before she got the chance. Either that, or she’s just trying to cause him trouble.

Then the silver-eyed girl sticks one hand out, prompting him to shake it.

“Summer Rose.”

_Summer_ , he tries, rolling her name silently over his tongue. It suits her, for the way she seems to come to life in the sun.

He shakes her hand. Her palm is slightly damp, callused from her weapon, and he wonders if perhaps she’s less delicate than she looks.

“Qrow Branwen,” he offers.

“So. We’re partners.”

“Guess we are,” he says. He drops her hand, and she wipes her sweaty palm along her skirt. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

+

Tai is going to be so mad at her. Well, she’s not really sure about that—Tai is lighthearted, easygoing. Summer’s never actually seen him angry before. But if she were Tai, she would be mad at her, so she spends her walk back to Beacon in forced silence, bracing herself for the worst.

“I’ve got a question,” says her partner. Her partner, who is not Taiyang Xiao Long. “What were you doing off the path like that? Trying to show off on the first day?”

“I was _trying_ to find my friend,” she answers sharply.

“And your friend likes to run around the darkest parts of the forest?”

“We’re not idiots, Qrow,” she says. “I’ll have you know I was captain of the safety patrol at Signal Academy.”

“You know, being a Huntress is dangerous work.”

“Oh, I know. I hated the safety patrol,” she assures him, waving her hand. “I only did it for the graduation medal.”

“Yeah, you look like you’d care about that sort of thing.”

She squints at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That’s for you to chew on.”

“Well chew on _this,_ Qrow Branwen. You and I are partners now. That means we’re stuck with each other for at least the next four years, so if I were you, I’d start taking me seriously.”

“Oof, Quicksilver’s got a temper.”

“Hey. I have a name.”

“A temper _and_ a name. Didn’t know you could dual-wield.”

She pulls open her cloak, revealing Cress and Lune clinging to her hips. “I can, actually.” Then she winks, adding, “The right one’s also a gun.”

“Aren’t you just full of surprises,” he remarks.

Summer scoffs at him, wrinkling her nose. He’s insufferable. Arrogant.

And that’s exactly what she needs to keep her on her toes.

The realization adds a bounce to her step. Competition is good. It scares her most the time, sends her stomach hurtling up her throat, but winning is the only way she’ll grow. Those nervous pulses of adrenaline, blush and sweat scalding her cheeks—she can make them into weapons, too, if she works hard enough.

And she has a partner, now. She knows nothing about him outside his sour attitude and well-organized face, but maybe they really will be good together, do what Ozpin said and fill each other’s gaps.

But if she finds she can eclipse him, she will.

With his long legs, Qrow begins to stride ahead of her, his hands tucked defenselessly into his pockets. He’s doing this on purpose, she realizes, already trying to rile her up. She breaks into a jog, pumping her arms. _You’re so lucky I’m not using my semblance on you right now, Birdbrain._

She almost catches up to him, but then her boots land in something viscous and sticky and she stops moving altogether. A tiny gasp escapes her throat. She looks down. Black, tar-like dirt flows out of the dark of the forest and pools over her feet, up her ankles. She tries drawing up her knees to loosen the muck, but while one foot wiggles a little, the other sinks deeper. Worry bubbles in her stomach.

“Qrow,” she calls, and though she does her best to keep her voice even, it cracks over his name.

He turns, cape swishing. “What, are you stuck?”

She motions to her legs, where the sludge seeps higher up her boots. “Yes. Literally.”

He looks her up and down. “Yeah, I think I’ll just keep moving along,” he says, then pivots and waves. “Catch you later, partner.”

Red flushes over her cheeks. “Hey! You get back here!”

“I’m kidding,” he says. He turns and crosses to where she kicks helplessly at the muck, taking a moment to chuckle at her. “Got yourself stuck in a Grimm pool, huh?”

Summer’s eyes shoot wide. “What?”

“Yeah. That’s what we call these in Mistral,” he says. “My sister got fell in one when we were kids. It’s just boggy soil, something like that.”

“Oh, so you’re just going to stand there and give me a science lesson?” she exclaims. “Or are you going to, I don’t know, _help me out of this?_ ”

“I mean, if I leave you here, maybe the partner you wanted will come along…”

“Qrow, please. I am going to sink,” she says. “And I’ve accepted it. We’re stuck with each other.”

“Actually, I think you’re the only one who’s stuck here.”

Summer glowers at him. Forget his handsome face—this boy is the absolute _worst._

“Jeez, if looks could kill,” he mutters, holding his arms out to her. “Just grab on.”

She clamps her hands on the creases of his elbows, making a bridge of their arms. He pulls once. Twice. She leans her whole body into it, but the mud is so cemented around her calves, she barely budges.

Qrow lets her go and steps back, brushes his hands together. “Okay, new plan. Lift your arms.”

“What?”

“Just do it.”

“Okay, okay,” she says and draws her arms above her head. The motion pushes the tails of her cloak behind her back.

Qrow dips for her waist. Strong arms encircle her ribcage, winding tight enough to make her squeak.

“You didn’t say you were going to manhandle me!” Summer exclaims.

“I am _trying_ to save you,” Qrow counters, voice muffled beneath her cloak. “Which unfortunately requires a little bit of manhandling.”

As his words trail off, he pulls up on her waist and hoists her out of the muck, the momentum sending her body straight over his shoulder. She’s free, she thinks, but then Qrow fastens an arm over the backs of her knees, like he intends to carry her that way.

“Put me down, please,” she demands.

“Wouldn’t you prefer I move you away from the hole you just got stuck in, first?”

Summer grits her teeth. “Fine.”

He curves a half-turn and sets her down on dry grass. With a huff, she takes stock of herself, smoothing her dress and tugging her cloak back over her shoulders. She counts one boot—the left—still laced up her calf, but the right is lost to the muck.

Qrow eyes her feet. “You plan on walking back like that?”

“Nope,” she says, and takes a knee to prove it. “I’ll just have to get a new pair when we go to the city.”

She unties the laces with precision, careful not to tangle them, as Qrow looks on. He’s smirking at her—she knows it. She stares at her shoes but all she feels is his gaze cutting into her, sharp with condescension.

_But you can be sharper,_ she tells herself. _Show him two can play at this game._

“I have never seen someone spend so much time untying their shoes,” he remarks.

Her head snaps up. She rises. Defiantly, she kicks her boot off her foot and into the grass.

She pops an eyebrow. “You were saying?”

“Come on,” he says. “We’re going to be the last ones back to base.”

They resume their previous rhythm of walking in silence—if slower, considering Summer is down to just her socks—and Summer’s mind fills the quiet with hypotheticals. As far as she knows, she won’t get much of a break from her partner. They’ll have to train together, eat together, sleep in the same dorm together. In class, they’ll sit in team formation, where they could very well be stuck beside each other. That’s far too many opportunities for him to get under her skin.

But a few clever comebacks surface in her mind, and she decides if Qrow ever decides to cross her, she’ll at least get to use them.

“I’m sorry about that, by the way,” he blurts. His voice, low and frighteningly sincere, draws Summer out of her daydreams. “I should’ve warned you.”

“About what?” she asks. “The mud?”

“Well, kind of. I’m just pretty sure it’s my fault you got stuck.”

Summer’s face tightens. “Is this the setup for a punchline?”

“My semblance is bad luck,” he answers, bluntly.

His face is a serious mask, but Summer still laughs. “Nope,” she says. “There’s no way that’s a real semblance.”

“And what qualifies a _real_ semblance, Miss Safety Patrol?”

“Not bad luck.”

“As far as I know, there’s no hard and fast rule for what can and can’t be a semblance,” he explains, and Summer notices he waves his hands when he talks. Not frantically, like she does, but gently, matching the slow-rolling cadence of his voice. “My sister can make portals to the people she’s bonded with, my mother can turn her shadow into a weapon, and I bring misfortune to anyone who gets close to me. It’s good against my enemies, but not so good for my friends.”

“That’s…depressing,” Summer says. She takes an unconscious step away from him, but he notices.

“I saw that.”

“Saw what?”

“You put a foot between us.”

“I did not.”

“You know, I’ve found my semblance has a pretty long range,” he says. “If you want to get away from it, you’re probably going to need a running start.”

Now Summer is the one smirking. “Well, that is my semblance,” she says, a proud smile stretching her cheeks. “I slow people down.”

“Quite the pair, aren’t we?”

“Our teammates are going to love us.”

Qrow laughs at that, and Summer stops just to listen to him, startled at how a boy who packs his words with grit could have a laugh so clear and bright.

“Is that a sense of humor I hear?” he remarks. “Maybe you are dangerous, Quicksilver.”

“Oh, you’ll see,” she says as she pulls the hood of her cloak tighter over her head and hopes it hides the giddy, foolish smile stretching apart her cheeks. 

  1. _the needle of a compass, always pointed North_



There are two-hundred students in this year’s entry class at Beacon, making fifty teams of four. Beyond the direction to stand with their partners, they form random clusters on the bleachers of the auditorium, their chatter echoing off the walls. Qrow has positioned himself and Summer at the back top of the dome-shaped room, which gives them a bird’s eye view of the other students. He looks for Raven among them, but he’s yet to spot her signature red bandanna.

Qrow has never had this kind of roof above his head before. When he’s not looking for Raven, he finds himself staring at it, following the unnatural bend of the wood to the elaborate chandelier that seems to hold it all together. The electric candles glow faintly, dimmed so as not to glare off the screen at the front of the room—the screen that in a few minutes will be announcing their team assignments.

“You looking for something?” Summer asks him, breaking him from his daze.

He lowers his chin. “Oh, uh…my twin sister.”

“Don’t think you’re going find her up there,” says Summer, and then her face gets very, very grim. “Oh my gods, wait, is she…”

“She’s alive,” he finishes for her. “She’s somewhere down there, with whoever her partner is.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” Summer says, brushing a hand across her forehead. “What’s she look like? I want to help.”

“Um, black hair, red dress, red bandanna. Probably acting like she’s too cool for everyone.”

“She definitely sounds like your twin.”

“Yeah, well if you meet her, you’re going to find we’re not exactly alike.”

Summer scans the crowd only a few seconds before she points to a spot near the front. Raven stands not aloof, like he’s used to, but as part of a clique. She talks to a girl with long, tight braids, but a blond boy about her same height hovers close to her—he must be her partner.

Qrow’s brows shoot up in surprise. “Wow. You found her.”

Raven turns to the boy, and Qrow can’t quite tell through his squint, but it looks like this cheery stranger his somehow making her smile.

“And she’s with Tai!” Summer chirps. “Tai is my friend from Signal, we used to spar together in gym class.”

“Was he the one you were looking for in the Emerald Forest?”

Summer rocks back and forth on her toes, hides her hands bashfully behind her back. “Maybe.”

“Well, I was looking for Raven,” Qrow says, “So maybe fate will be kind to us and stick us all together.”

Now Summer is the one squinting. “Wait. Your parents named you _both_ after birds _?_ ”

Qrow freezes. It’s not like he can tell her about the tribe. As far as he’s concerned, Summer will never know about his past—until they graduate, he will be just another boy from Mistral. Things will be better for the both of them, that way. Summer seems so earnest, so kind. He’s never been sympathetic to the hero type, but something about her strikes different.

She hardly deserves a partner like him.

“It’s a…family tradition,” he answers, finally, and it’s enough to satisfy her.

“Attention, students,” booms a voice from the bottom of the auditorium. Professor Ozpin walks across the stage floor, weight shifted to his cane. Qrow called him old, but really, he’s young for a headmaster, especially of a school of Beacon’s status. It’s the white hair, he thinks, that’s so deceiving.

“Congratulations once again on your acceptance to Beacon Academy, the training ground of Remnant’s most gifted young warriors,” Ozpin starts, taking a place at the onstage podium. “You all are standing here today not only because you have the potential to become great Huntsmen and Huntresses, but also great leaders, and great citizens. The future of Remnant and its people is a heavy weight to bear, but my staff and I here intend to give you the tools with which to carry it. However, you must work for them. Your training here will not be without its dangers. You will be sent into the field, fighting alongside professional Huntsmen, and eventually, on your own. You will compete in the Vytal Festival Tournament, putting all of your skills on display—and on the line. And you may find, within these glittering halls and soaring towers, not everyone is your friend. Though I like to keep that last one to a minimum. Regardless, the key to your success here begins with you. What you do for yourself becomes what you do for your partner, and then you and your partner must do for your team. This is how we build community. A network. An army.

“While the selection of your partners belonged to chance, the selection of your teams has been deliberate—I have put you together based on your abilities, your characters, how you might and help and support one another. I have chosen leaders who will stoke an environment of camaraderie and growth. It is up to you, however, to create synergy. You must be a unit. One body, four parts, treating the loss of one as the loss of all. This sounds like a lot to ask of children. But you are no ordinary children. You are warriors, dreamers, fighters, survivors—you are the heart of the future you’re fighting for. Again, I extend my warmest congratulations to all of you. Now, why don’t we roll the teams?”

What little light remains in the room flickers out. Ozpin announces the first few teams as the screen flashes their pictures—CAKE, PEAS, LZER—before Summer and Qrow’s headshots appear side-by-side.

She digs an elbow into his rib. “Look!” she exclaims. “That’s us!”

Their photographs split to opposite sides of the screen, and two empty gray boxes appear between them. Countless photos scroll in lightspeed tempo until Taiyang, Summer’s sunny-haired friend from Signal, is a lock for the first box. The second, as expected, bears the smirking image of his sister.

Relief quiets his nerves. He and Raven may not be partners, but at least on the same team, it will still be easy to keep up with their mission.

“Next up is Team STRQ,” Ozpin calls, “with Summer Rose of Vale leading Taiyang Xiao Long, also of Vale, and Raven and Qrow Branwen of Mistral.”

Summer squeaks. “Yes!” she whisper-yells, shaking her fists with excitement. “You hear that? I’m Team Leader!”

“Congratulations, Quicksilver,” he says.

“Are you ever going to use my real name?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I wouldn’t expect it.”

“Then I’m going to call you Birdbrain.”

“I’ll take it.”

She rolls her eyes and turns back to watching the team assignments.

With her distracted, Qrow puts a little more distance between them. He shouldn’t be so warm with her, this girl who was so unfortunate to land him as a partner. _The kind of girl you’re training to kill,_ his thoughts remind him. Shaken, he curls his hands beneath the edge of the bleachers. It’s just a survival instinct, he assures himself, this desire to protect her. She’s his teammate, his partner, his team leader—she’s practically the key to his success here, so long as he fends off her suspicion.

At least when he and Raven leave them, Summer and Tai will have each other. They’ll be better off that way—that much he’s sure of. 

+

There’s a reception in the courtyard after team assignments. Qrow, having not eaten since breakfast, tries to make a beeline for one of the many snack tables, but then Summer’s hand is curling in his cape, dragging him away.

“What are you doing?” she exclaims. “We have to get the team together.”

“My apologies, but those butter tarts over there were calling my name.”

“Then let’s all get some together,” she declares. “As a _team._ ”

They find Raven and Tai under a tree at the edge of the courtyard, engaging in hushed conversation between sips of punch.

“Are we interrupting something?”

Raven’s eyes turn to slits as she lowers her cup. “Hello, little brother.”

“She always calls me that,” Qrow says to Tai. “Like, it’s a thirteen-minute difference. Also, I’m taller.”

“Barely,” Raven insists.

“You all should stand back-to-back, let us be the judge,” says Tai.

“Really?” Qrow exclaims. “We’re teammates now, and you’re not going to take my word for it?”

Raven looks to Summer, clearly sizing her up. Summer shrinks back into her hood.

“Summer, right? Team Leader?” Raven asks.

Summer nods.

“Hold my drink for me.”

Raven places her punch in Summer’s hands. Then she grabs Qrow and whirls him around, slams her back into his. Her head comes just up to his ears.

“Sorry Raven, this one’s no contest,” says Tai. “Your bro here is taller.”

“It’s okay,” Summer says, if somewhat meekly. “He just needs more space for his ego.”

There’s a stunned silence as even Tai, who actually knows her, looks surprised at Summer’s comeback.

Then Raven doubles over with laughter. Qrow has to blink a few times, just to make sure he’s seeing this right. That Raven, who never laughs, hardly ever smiles, is giggling so hard she’s struggling to breathe. He’s going to have to ask this Tai guy what he did with his real sister, and where he got the happy, girly clone.

“Hey,” she says when she recovers, pointing at Summer but looking at Qrow. “I like her.”

Raven snatches her drink back from Summer, then shakes her hand. “I’m Raven.”

“Hi.”

“Sis, I think you’re scaring her,” Qrow says.

Raven flashes her brother the only kind of smile he knows from her, sharp and full of pride. “Good,” she says. “You know, I think I’m really going to _thrive_ here.”

“Well, I vote that when we face up against a horde of Grimm, we send her out first,” says Tai, pointing to his partner.

Raven entertains him with a wink over her shoulder, and suddenly, Qrow understands. His sister is acting. Creating a façade to distance herself from the team, making it easier to do her job. The fear she confessed on their last night in Mistral is either gone or buried deep, obscured by this bubbly new Raven who just might scare him more than the one he knows.

_How is she always one step ahead of me?_

“Hey Summer,” says Tai, breaking him from his thoughts, “Where are your shoes?”

Summer glimpses her feet, then meets Tai with a sheepish smile. “Oh that’s…that’s a long story.”

“But she would be happy to tell it,” Qrow says, and some bold part of him compels him to clamp his hands on his partner’s shoulders, “on the way to the snack tables.”


	2. circulations 4-6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be real, I went a little overboard on this one. But I warned you, sh*t was gonna get real. Thank you for your kind comments, and I hope you enjoy this next installment! I made it with love. And a laptop with a half broken keyboard, so I'll probably have to edit out typos later. *cries*

  1. _the principle of reciprocity_



It’s been a month since they first set foot in the halls of Beacon Academy, and Qrow is finding it increasingly hard to get his sister alone.

Back with the tribe, he was so used to her keeping to herself. Unless the two of them were sparring, Raven wanted to be alone, or if not alone, at her mother’s side, always desperate to make herself into a perfect little shadow of her. She’ll lead the tribe one day, once Leader Carian passes. Even if Qrow had been the older one, even if his semblance hadn’t been the curse that it is, their mother would’ve always favored Raven more.

_Favored_ , he reminds himself. Not loved. Branwens do not love. They crawl and they steal and they fight, and it isn’t until they gather up the spoils of survival that they’re allowed to play favorites. But they cannot love. Love whittles them. Love makes it harder to survive.

Tonight, Qrow finds Raven out in the courtyard, loitering on the rim of one of the fountains. She seems to be preening herself, using brushes of water to secure her hair in her bandanna.

“Hey, little brother.”

“Seems like you’re in a good mood,” he grumbles. “Considering what we have to talk about.”

“Well, I just kicked Tai’s ass in a sparring session and made him sneak me extra dessert, so I’ve been worse.”

“You know, I’m starting to think you’re getting a soft side, hanging out with your partner all the time.”

Raven scoffs at that. “Absolutely not.”

“Then let’s get serious,” he says. “Our tribe contacts were supposed to meet us two weeks ago. We had all the info about those second years headed to our area of Mistral, and they never showed.”

“Maybe they gave us the wrong rendezvous point.”

“We know they wouldn’t.”

Tension wrings the space between them—they both know Qrow is right.

Raven glances to the side to scout for potential eavesdroppers. “Do we have an idea of how many Huntsmen patrol the forests around here?” she asks.

“Not sure,” Qrow answers. “But the Headmaster seems to keep a good number of them on reserve, at least to lead the field trips. Then there’s the third-years on regular grounds patrol, but I wouldn’t exactly call them an obstacle.”

Raven takes to her feet and begins to pace, one hand tucked over the hilt of her sword. “They wouldn’t have staked out in the city. We don’t do cities unless we have to,” she mutters. “Maybe they’re just late.”

“By two weeks? I get it, it’s not exactly easy travels from Mistral if you’re not on an academy airship, but I think you’re giving them too much benefit of the doubt, here.”

“I just want to finish the mission, Qrow.”

“Well, we have four years for that,” Qrow says. He dips a hand into the fountain and stirs his fingers through the water, watching the motion ripple and distort his reflection. “You know, it’s funny to hear you talk like this.”

She stops pacing. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know. You seem really into the whole playing students thing,” he says. “You’re getting a lot of attention. You show off in combat class, and people talk. And you like it.”

“Well, I’ve heard you telling Tai about your _girls_.”

He draws his hand out of the water and sets it on his knee. “That’s different.”

Her brows pull together. “Is it?”

“It’s not like I’m going around falling in love, Raven,” he says, which gets a sharp, tiny laugh out of his sister. “I think we’re both just doing what we can to fill the time.”

She pauses a beat, like she actually believes him—maybe even _agrees_ with him. But he does mean what he says. Sure, he’s hooked up with a few girls since coming to Beacon, but he knows better than to go chasing after things he can’t keep.

“Let’s go back to the rendezvous point tomorrow night, do a full survey,” Raven proposes. “They might’ve left something there we didn’t spot.”

“Or maybe one of Ozpin’s loyal Huntsmen got to them, first,” Qrow suggests. “We know they know about us. The tribe.”

“They call us a ‘bunch of bandits’, Qrow—I wouldn’t exactly call that intel.”

“Still.”

Raven lets out a sigh. “We’ll make a plan tomorrow,” she says. “In the meantime, I’m going to go steal your partner for the next hour.”

There’s something about the way she says _partner,_ with her lips pursed too heavy around the _p,_ that makes him think she might be taunting him in some vague, Raven way. He thins his eyes at her. “Is that so?” he says, mimicking her teasing lilt. “Did she rope you into ‘girls’ night’ or something?”

“Yes, actually,” Raven says, and sets her hands on her hips. “I’ve got girls’ night, you’re going to ruin some girl’s night—I think we’re even on embarrassments for now, little brother.”

“Well, at least I won’t be ending the night in pink nail polish,” he counters, though there’s no real venom to it.

“Says he who almost wore a _skirt_ the first day of class.”

“Listen, Tai was an asshole for that and he’s lucky I forgave him.”

“And you wonder why he and I get along,” Raven teases. She turns on the backs of her heels and heads back towards the dorms, the feather pleats on her skirt swishing with her walk.

“Yeah, I think you’re getting along a little too well.”

That makes her stop. She shifts her head slightly, just enough for her brother to see her profile. “I’m surviving, Qrow,” she says, and that brief lightness in her voice recedes beneath the usual ice. “You know that’s half the job.”

+

The next night, there’s nothing at the rendezvous. They poke their heads in the hollows of trees, turn over rocks, part every patch of high grass with the soles of their shoes, hoping their scroll lights might snag on anything of use to them, but the rendezvous point is barren. Either someone got there before them, or their tribe contacts never came. 

“I don’t understand,” Raven mutters. “Were we wrong? Was it next month they were coming, instead of this one? We didn’t have scrolls back then—we could’ve forgotten the days.”

“See. You solved your own problem.”

“Except I didn’t!” she shouts, balling her hands into fists. “We still don’t know what happened. We don’t know what’s _going_ to happen.”

“Hey,” he says, and some softer part of him makes him set a hand on her heaving shoulder. He expects her to flick it away, but she just stands there, tempering her breath, eyes wrenched wide with a panic she’s desperate to keep from overtaking the rest of her.

“We’re going to do what you said,” he says. “We’re going to go through the motions, get the information we need, and we’re going to survive.”

She nods, and something snaps in her. Her gaze goes clear. The tension in her brow and cheeks irons out.

“The weak die,” she whispers. “The strong live.”

“And we’re Branwens. We’re strong,” he says, finishing the incantation. He takes his hand from her shoulder. “You head on back to school. I’ll be right behind you.”

He lets her go until he knows she’ll be safe, that his semblance won’t bring any stray Grimm or human trouble her direction, before he makes his own way back to Beacon.

+

When Qrow and Raven were twelve, the Branwen clan lived in the mountains. It was cold most the year, which was never good for their narrow bodies, but Qrow liked to climb up the tall, spindly pines and stare out at the snow-dusted valleys behind the needles, the way the mountains poked a snaggletooth relief into the sky. On the colder nights, when he’d be slow to climb the trees under the heavy furs of his coat, he could sometimes see ribbons of light in the distance, bunching and wrinkling like celestial curtains. He liked the isolation of it, being alone on top of the world, but mostly he liked the way it made his smallness feel less significant; everything was tiny beneath the stars.

It’s that same want of peace of mind that drives him to the flat rooftops of the Beacon Academy dorms. The view here is nothing like the one in the mountains, and the sky is far too saturated with city lights for the stars to show, but he finds there’s still something calming about the nighttime mist that spools over the courtyards, wrapping its spectral embrace around the trees. Qrow perches himself on the outer ledge of the roof, weapon dormant in his lap, and a wind from the bay brushes gently through his hair.

He could fall asleep out here, he thinks. It’d be a lot nicer than having to listen to Tai’s snoring—he’d say the same for Summer’s sleep babble, but against his better judgment, he actually finds it kind of endearing, how she’ll mumble to herself in a language only she can understand.

Qrow wishes he could figure her out. They haven’t slotted together the way Tai and Raven have; she is recklessly ambitious, always volunteering them for demonstrations when he isn’t paying attention or throwing herself into spars with boys twice her size. She fights at a longer range than he does, which will balance them once they really get out in the field, but her technique, if dagger-sharp, is erratic. Unpredictable. Even outside of class, she moves about like a hummingbird, vacillating between her airy, helpful moods and bouts of rigid focus, her gentle face creased with an intensity that pulls shadows deep into her eyes.

But maybe it’s him. Maybe he brings her misfortune by throwing her rhythms off kilter, plaguing her not with thunderclaps of disaster but a current of frustrating missteps.

He supposes there are worse things he could give her.

Sleep starts to pull at his eyes, so he climbs off the ledge and fits himself against the wall, Harbinger propped beside him. He lets his eyes fall closed, and coupled with the cool air, the darkness is soothing, something to wrap up in, a place to hide. 

Until a familiar voice, high and cutting, shines through it. “You missed a team meeting.”

He blinks a few times, just to make sure it really is his partner standing before him. She reminds him of a ghost again, with her cloak closed against the wind.

Slowly, he unwinds himself and rolls to his feet. “So what?” he mumbles, rubbing the heaviness from his eyes. “It’s not like it’s our last meeting ever.”

“Your sister was there.”

He offers a shrug. “Well, she is on the team.”

She looks like she’s about to burst, like whatever she’s been pushing down with her study sessions and hours in the training gym is on the brim of coming loose.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” he asks, and hopes his voice is gentle enough not to rattle her.

But it seems it only sends her over the edge. “I get it, okay?” she sighs, thrusting her hands into the air. “You are just _way_ too cool for the rest of us. Which is fine, I’m not blaming you for being inherently _cooler_ than me or whatever, it’s just…we’re not in this to be _cool,_ Qrow. I mean, maybe you are, and if you’re just going to Beacon to get the whole ‘rugged Huntsman’ look then trust me, with that patchy facial hair, you have reached your destination. But…we have to fight together, and I don’t know about you, but when I’m on the battlefield, I prefer to have somebody watching my back. Which, if you’ll remember from the very first day of class, is _supposed_ to be you.”

So this is what’s been bothering her. The distance. Him turning down her requests to train together, missing meetings, ignoring her texts. He could push back, argue that she’s too hard to keep up with, that he wouldn’t even be here if he didn’t have to be, and even if he wanted to be, too much time around her would be bad for the both of them, but he bottles the truth and throws up a smirk in defense. 

“Huh. You sure you didn’t like the safety patrol?”

Her hands make tiny, bony fists at her sides. “This isn’t just about safety, Qrow—this is about the future of our team. If we want to stick together after graduation, then we have to start sticking together now. I mean, even Raven is putting in the effort to spend time with me and Tai, and she’s…”

“…Raven,” he finishes for her.

“Yes. Raven. Not exactly warm and fuzzy.”

“Look, I’m a solitary guy for a reason. A lot of reasons, actually. None of which are any of your business. But, you’re right. I’m also your partner, and…”

Her brows peak. “Wait go back.”

“What?”

“Say it again.”

“Say what?”

“That I’m right.”

He sighs, leaning his cheek into his palm. “You’re right, Summer. I can…do better.”

She wrings her face, pursing focus-bitten lips into something like a heart. This expression of hers he can recognize—she’s thinking. Strategizing. Which means he should probably be bracing himself.

Her gaze flickers to Harbinger, then back to him. “Train with me.”

“Right now?” he asks.

“You bet.” She flips her scabbards out of their holsters and starts in his direction. “We are going to whip you into shape.”

He has little time to grab his weapon before she spins for him, one blade chasing the other. Harbinger locks into sword form just as Summer’s first blade lands, and the impact throws a burst of sparks.

“What makes you think I’m out of shape, Quicksilver?” Qrow asks, watching her over the junction of their blades. She seems hopeful, satisfied he’s risen to her challenge.

“Because I don’t believe bad luck is your real semblance.”

He draws his sword away with a roll of his eyes. “This again,” he grumbles, shaking his head. “And how, Fearless Leader, do you plan to magically unlock my _real semblance_?”

“Determination,” she says. “And some focus exercises I learned at Signal.”

“Heh. Focus _._ ”

She swings for him again, and he isn’t fast enough to block with much force. Her hit outweighs him. He goes flying across the brick and lands on his tailbone, hard enough to trigger a flood of aura down his back.

“That’s right,” she says. “ _Focus._ ”

Her smile bids him to his feet. They throw their blades into one another, filling the night with the clang of metal. There’s a curiosity about her movements, Qrow realizes—she is studying him, learning his style. And she’s good at it. In a spare beat, she sheathes one scabbard to favor the other, and it’s like he’s fighting a tiny, slightly sloppier mirror of himself.

Until it isn’t. Her thumb spins along the hilt of her sword, then she tucks in towards him before she can shield himself. The butt of her hilt doesn’t hit him very hard, but a heavy feeling overtakes him—not her semblance, but something hot and powdery and distinctly purple. It knocks him back to the ground, and Harbinger skids out of his hand. 

“Gravity dust?” he exclaims to the sky.

And then the sky is her. She steps over him and kneels, locking his chest between her thighs. His breath stutters. He expects confidence from her, a near-cocky smile stretching her full, pink lips, but she glows instead with admiration. She looks at him like she cares about him, and that would terrify him if it didn’t look so damn good on her face.

“Got you, Birdbrain,” she says.

“I guess you did,” he exhales, and he isn’t sure where he gets the guts to rest a hand on the outside of her thigh, just below the hem of her skirt, but it feels right for the moment, so he does. Her breath hiccups, her eyes popping wide before she smiles again and rests a hand over his, holding it there, and suddenly his chest is on fire with something far different from dust.

This is the girl he’s been hiding from. This is Summer, his partner, a star-colored spark against the night. The kind of girl who can kill him a hundred different ways, and a part of him knows he’d let her.

He can’t do this. He can’t let himself look at her like this—can’t let her look at _him_ like this—but the gravity dust must still be holding down his bones because all he can do is stare up at her, breathing, as if the moon and the wind and the hangover of adrenaline have locked them both in a trance.

Then his scroll chirps in his pocket, and Summer’s face drops. She rolls off him and climbs to her feet, fixes the pleats in her skirt with a few quick brushes of her fingers.

With an oddly shaking hand, he draws out his scroll and checks it. The message is from Calla Combs, the girl he was supposed to be meeting tonight. She’s pretty, sure, but he feels nothing when he looks at her photo. 

“Go,” Summer says, fitting her scabbard back into its sheath. “I’m sure she’s waiting for you.”

He glances at the message, then back to Summer as she tugs her cloak tighter around her shoulders, like she’s trying to disappear within it.

“You know, you still haven’t unlocked my real semblance,” he says, pushing a playful lilt into his voice. “So, I think I’m going to have to stick around here.”

She beams at him, drawing back the tails of her cloak, and it sets off a funny feeling in his knees. This is bad—this is very, _very_ bad. But for now, he’ll indulge her. For all his betrayal to come, a night or two of sparring is the least he can do.

+

Months later, Summer finds her partner in their now usual training spot, a constellation of shiny tools spread before him as he works on his weapon in its largest form, a shotgun scythe with a long, red handle. It’s one of her favorite designs she’s seen at Beacon so far—not to mention she’s found herself awfully attached to the person who wields it.

But she knows that she and Qrow could never happen. At least not while he’s intent on flirting with everything that moves, and she’s so focused on her studies. So she remains cautious around him. Gone is her boldness from their first night of sparring, together, when she held her body over his like it belonged there. Still, she blushes at the memory of his hand there on her thigh, and silently wishes it’ll find its way there again, one of these days.

He looks up when he hears her footsteps. “Hey, Shortstuff.”

“You know, I have a name.”

“And I don’t care,” he says, jabbing under one of the plates of his scythe with a screwdriver. “I’m collecting a full arsenal of nicknames for you, Munchkin, so don’t hold your breath.”

She sits down on the rooftop and spreads out her cloak. “Can I call you Dumbass, then?”

“Sounds great, Princess.”

Summer rolls her eyes. “You and Tai did well on your doubles exam today,” she says. “I felt pretty sorry for those kids from team LZER.”

“Yeah, well, you should’ve heard the guys behind me talking about you and Raven,” he says. “I think they called you, ‘venom and thorns.’ You’re the thorns, obviously.”

“I figured,” Summer quips. “Tai’s lucky—your sister’s a good partner. I can’t wait for us all to fight together in the Vytal Festival Tournament.”

He makes a little noise of agreement, then leans back into his work.

“Why the scythe?” Summer prods.

“Because of a legend,” he says, continuing to spin the screwdriver. “The Grimm Reaper. She took out Grimm by the hundreds, protecting the people of Mistral with a pair of double scythes. The El—my grandfather used to tell me and Raven stories about her, showed us the pictures from books. But she wasn’t a fairy tale. She was real. Until she disappeared.” 

Summer feels a twinge of grief in her chest, muted by time but still achingly present. If only Vale had had a Grimm Reaper of its own when she was a child. Maybe then her parents would have lived that night. Maybe then her grandmother would be kinder, instead of filling her with pinpricks of guilt because she was the survivor instead of her father, her grandmother’s only son. Maybe then her tiny frame would feel big enough.

“Do you know why I really want to be a Huntress, Qrow?” she asks, firmly, despite the quivering in her jaw.

He sets down his tools and gazes at her, ruby eyes dark with concern. “Do you want to tell me?”

“When I was a little girl, I lived in a tiny village on the outskirts of Vale,” she starts. “It was the place where my mom was born, her whole family made up about half the town. But one night—I was seven, I think—a horde of Grimm attacked. We didn’t have any Huntsmen, hardly anyone had guns; it was a massacre. I remember being hunkered down with my parents in the cellar, their arms over me like some kind of useless shield, but the Grimm got past the locked door.” Summer shudders, trying her best to conjure up the image while the rest of her wants to force it down. “My father shoved me back against the wall while he and my mom tried to fight them off with broomsticks, but they didn’t stand a chance. I had to watch them be ripped apart. And then everything was burning, and I was screaming out for them, and I think I just blacked out with fear. When I woke up, I was being carried by this Huntress through a mess of ash and blood and I knew, somehow, I was the only one who survived that night.

“So, I went to live with my grandmother on Patch, and she took me to visit Signal, where the Huntress who’d saved me used to teach, and I knew then that I had to devote my life to saving people from all the pain and grief I went through. No one should have to watch their parents die like that, Qrow. No amount of strength is worth that price.”

Her partner is still for a moment, his eyes blank and mouth drooped slightly as he wrestles with the weight of her story. She should go. She’s veered into dangerous territory, baring so much of her heart to someone who insists on being heartless.

But just as she’s about to get up, he bends over his weapon to bring her hands into his. “I don’t really know what to say to comfort you; I’m bad at things like this,” he admits, running his thumbs over her knuckles. “But, I…what can I do?”

“Just let me protect you,” she says. “You, Tai, Raven. Show me how to lead so we can stay together.”

“So you can have a family,” he finishes for her, and the word ‘family’ on his lips makes her heart constrict even tighter.

He lets go of her hands and crawls over his weapons, coming closer until their knees are touching. She reaches, against her better knowledge, for his fingers again, feeling suddenly bare without his comforting touch, but before she can take them, he wraps her in his arms and clutches her to his chest. Their foreheads bump, which makes her laugh despite the fact that it definitely hurt, and she leans her head on his shoulder, cheeks burning at the thought of how close her lips just were to his.

“I wish I could protect you, too,” he whispers. “But you know what I am.”

“And you know I don’t believe that.”

“What can I do for you?” he repeats.

Need overtakes any hesitation, and she lets her body do what it wants, to wedge his knees apart with one of her own and nestle closer to him. “Can you hold me like this?” she asks. “Just for a minute?”

“I think I can manage that,” he says, and he fastens his arms tighter around her back, enclosing her in his warmth. 

To others, maybe he is misfortune. But to Summer, he feels like home. 

  1. _a feeling of perpetual rounded motion_



When Qrow comes back from dinner after training, he catches Raven alone in their room, spread across not her bed but Tai’s, a textbook propped open on her bent knees. He sits down at the edge of the bed, and Raven throws out a leg to kick him in the side.

“Get off, I’m busy,” she snaps.

“And I have something to ask you.”

“What?”

“If you’re going to keep sleeping with Tai, can I have your bed to make mine bigger?”

She claps the book closed. “I’m not sleeping with him,” she stammers. Pink quickly colors her milk-pale cheeks. 

“You know, I do wake up in the middle of the night sometimes,” Qrow counters. “I see you.”

“Well, what happens on my side of the room is my business.”

“What, does Tai want you to hold him after his nightmares?” he asks, mockingly.

Raven smirks at that. “Do I detect some emotional projection here, little brother?”

“Answer the question.”

“We’re not serious,” she insists. “We’re messing around. Just like you used to.” 

“Used to?” he asks, pretending to be offended even though he knows it’s true. He hasn’t gotten with a girl since he started training with Summer every night.

But Raven’s connected those dots before he has. “You should hear her going on about you, Qrow,” she says. “It’s so cute, how she thinks you’ll actually get your head out of your ass.”

“What do you mean by that?” he asks, unsure of whether to be flattered that Summer talks about him, or confused at Raven’s refusal to get to the point.

“You know. Us girls, we talk,” Raven says. “I don’t know what she sees in you, but whatever it is, she sure is determined.”

It takes him a few blinks to process what she’s insinuating. That Summer isn’t just training with him because she doesn’t believe in his semblance. That she’s doing it because she _likes_ him. Against his better judgment, he lets the thought kick up his heartbeat.

He knows what he can allow himself. Quick nights in closets and vacant dorms, hands that don’t quite fit with his, hearts he doesn’t mind breaking. Having Summer would ruin him—ruin them both. She has the stars in her eyes and the sun in her smile and he’d never forgive himself if he ever caused that light to go out.

“All I’m saying is I’m not the one who should be worried about getting attached,” Raven adds. “We’ll be home soon.”

“I know. The Vytal Tournament is at Haven this year,” Qrow says, his chest lightening at the change of subject. “I’m sure someone from the tribe will come pay us a visit.”

“It’ll be our chance to exchange information,” Raven says. “Since no one seems to have made it to Vale in the _months_ we’ve been here.”

“You think we’ll be able to slip out?”

“If we find some Haven kids to keep our partners busy, we will.”

The mattress beneath them vibrates suddenly, coupled with cheery, unison tones from their scrolls. They read their messages, then look to each other.

“Oz wants us in his office,” Qrow says. “Right now.”

“You think it’s the whole team?” Raven asks. “I didn’t think we’d gotten into that much trouble lately.”

Qrow shrugs. “I guess we’ll just have to go and find out.”

+

Ozpin’s desk sits on a floor made of clockwork cased in glass. As Qrow slumps into the office behind Raven, he watches the gears move beneath his shoes, heavy ticks echoing like a second heartbeat. It isn’t until they stop—a safe distance from the edge of their Headmaster’s desk—that he glances up and looks the man in the eye. He has his fingers steepled beneath his chin, his dark eyes peering over his readers. The problem with Ozpin, beyond being the last person who should ever find out about their mission, is that he’s even worse about showing emotion than Raven is. Disappointment, pride, contentment—they all take the same face in him, some neutral set that seems sage and youthful at once.

“Good afternoon, Miss Branwen,” he says to Raven, then nods to Qrow. “Mr. Branwen.”

“You sent for us?” Qrow says, waving his scroll.

“Indeed I did,” he says. He stands behind his desk, cane in hand, and comes around it. “Would you two follow me?”

He leads them to the center of the room, the heart of the slow-spinning clockwork. With the wave of a hand, he activates a holographic map of Remnant. The shapes of the continents have always reminded Qrow of a dragon breathing fire in the face of a girl.

Ozpin taps the hologram, and a rash of red explodes across it. “Do you see those lights?” he asks.

“Well, they’re hard to miss,” Qrow says, and Raven jabs him in the elbow.

“This is our most recent survey of Grimm activity,” Ozpin continues. “As you can see, the Kingdoms have had to spread our Huntsmen thin—graduating strong new Huntsmen from our academies is a vital priority. It is talented students like the two of you, and your partners, that give me hope we’ll be able to keep this Grimm resurgence under control. But unfortunately, Grimm aren’t the only thing giving our men trouble in the field.”

Dread pools in Qrow’s stomach as yellow blots join the red. They concentrate in tiny pockets on every continent, but Qrow can only focus on the cluster in western Mistral, the very place the tribe was last stationed.

“These are our human obstacles,” Ozpin says. “Gangs, bandits, organized crime rings. All bent on making our job of protecting Remnant much harder than it should be.”

Qrow takes a glance at his sister. The calm on her face is nearly infuriating—but he doesn’t miss the twitching in her fingers.

“I know why the two of you are here,” Ozpin says, locking both hands over his cane. “I will admit I took a great risk when I saw your Branwen name and chose to admit you. But I admitted you because I saw your potential, because I believed a Beacon education could make you better than your upbringing. You’ll know, then, that I was…disheartened to learn you’d come here only to gain the skills to turn against the very people who wanted to lift you up.”

“How could you know that?” Raven asks, eyes wide.

“I’ve had a special set of eyes looking after you,” he says, looking not at either of the twins but somewhere above and between them.

They turn together, and Summer Rose steps in from the door. 

“Summer?” Qrow whispers; it’s all he can find the breath for.

She walks past them and joins Ozpin at his side. There is no pride in her eyes like Qrow expects—only the heaviness of disappointment, a bleary gaze that makes his own chest feel hollow with guilt.

“I’m so sorry,” Summer mouths.

He wants to be angry. He wants to scream at her, this little spy, this girl who’s dug herself so frighteningly deep into his heart, but he can’t.

“You aren’t in trouble,” Ozpin says. “We do try to have some compassion around here.”

“Then what is this?” Raven exclaims. “How long have you known? How long has _she_ known?”

Summer takes a step forward. She lays a hand on Raven’s shoulder, and Qrow doesn’t know how she doesn’t clam up.

“I want to trust you, Raven,” says Summer. “You’re my best friend.”

Raven just looks at her feet.

“You don’t have to be what you came from,” Summer pushes.

At that, Raven’s head snaps up. “You don’t know what I came from. What it means to me.”

“I don’t know that. You’re right,” Summer says. “But I know who you are as a Huntress, and my friend. And I care about you. So does Tai.” 

The mention of Tai is what breaks her. She closes her hand over Summer’s and shutters her eyes, as if it will make her immune to her gaze. Qrow could laugh at that, if he wanted. Summer has a magnetism none of them seem able to resist.

“Remember what you told me before our doubles exam the other day?” Summer asks.

“You were nervous. So I told you to be strong.” 

Summer nods. “You did. And that’s all we want from you, Raven. To be strong. However you think that should be.”

Then Summer slips away from her, and Qrow’s breath snags in his chest as his partner makes her way towards him.

She gathers up his hands in hers, and he braces himself for the sound of his name on her lips.

“Don’t blame yourself for this, Qrow,” Summer says, slotting her fingers between his. “You’re going to say the reason you and Raven got caught discussing your plans is because of your bad luck, but that’s not true. You’re not the curse you think you are.”

“Summer, please don’t.”

“I won’t,” she says. “The Headmaster just asked me to talk to you as a teammate. Talk to the parts of you I know. But you’re more than just my teammate.” She smiles a little, which only makes his chest feel emptier. “You’re my partner, and my friend, and I just want you to make the right decisions.”

“You know I’m full of bad decisions, Shortstuff.”

“Only because you think you have to be.”

That cuts him. Shame pulls his gaze to the gears whirring beneath his feet. How could he give her the chance to learn him like this? Is that all he’s been to her—another study, another challenge? And why does he care in the first place?

“If it were me out there in Mistral, stopping one of your tribe’s raids, would you let them kill me?”

“No,” he answers before he can think about it. “I wouldn’t.”

She brings their clasped hands against her chest and closes her eyes, almost like she’s praying. To what gods, he doesn’t know. “Thank you, Qrow,” she says, and she steps back towards Ozpin.

“Since I do not want to give Miss Rose the full burden of convincing you to be honest in your studies, I am going to give you a choice,” says Ozpin. “In just a few short weeks, you’ll begin your exchange at Haven Academy as competitors in the bi-annual Vytal Festival Tournament. I understand you’ll be very close to your relatives. You can either stay with your team, study hard, and complete your run in the tournament, or you can sneak out and collude with your tribe. I’m not going to exert any control over you. Just know that if we find any evidence of your communication with the tribe, you will be promptly released from Beacon Academy. Understood?”

“Understood,” the twins echo.

“Very good,” says Ozpin. “Miss Rose, Miss Branwen—you’re dismissed. But Mr. Branwen, I’d like you to stay behind a moment.”

Raven turns, silently fuming, and heads out the door. Summer goes right behind her, but not before giving Qrow’s shoulder a gentle squeeze, a wordless _Take care of yourself._ He wishes she hadn’t.

Ozpin steps closer as the door falls shut.

“What do you want from me?” Qrow asks, letting hostility creep into his voice.

“I know about your semblance.”

“Did Summer tell you that, too?”

“Yes, but unlike her, I believe it’s true. It lines up with what I’ve heard from your professors,” he says. “But it does not make you hopeless.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“You can be something here, Qrow,” Ozpin says, and Qrow jolts at the confidence in his voice. “I can tell your power scares you, but you can hone it. Make it a force for good. There is a place in this world for boys like you, and it is not raiding villages with bandits. It’s fighting on the front lines. Keeping humankind safe. Being a part of something bigger.”

Qrow fights the impulse to roll his eyes. “I’m sure you tell all your students that.”

“I think your team—especially your partner—believes in you more than I do. Keep that in mind during our travels to Mistral,” Ozpin tells him. “You may be dismissed.”

When Qrow enters the outside hall, it feels like his whole body is stinging. He thought they’d been careful. Raven only discussed their plans with him at night, when no one was around. At least they thought. But somehow, Summer had known, been directed to follow them. Still, he can’t be mad at her. He knows how she is: when a professor tells her what to do, she does it.

He needs to stop thinking about Summer, though, and find Raven. He has no idea what they’re going to do.

+

Raven wins the tournament.

She does not revel in her victory. Adrenaline makes a ragged husk of her body, toppling her to her knees. Her classmates and team shout her name over and over— _RAVEN, RAVEN, RAVEN_ —as if the lift of their voices will peel her from the ground. But the sword in her right hand falls, and then so do her shoulders, her arms, until her knees and elbows are all that keep her face from crashing into the cold arena floor, making her level with the poor Atlas Academy student she’s just defeated.

Out on the sidelines, Summer gives Qrow’s sleeve a tug. “Do we go get her?”

“No,” two voices answer as one. Qrow looks to Tai and lets him finish. “Let her breathe.”

They do. Five seconds pass. Ten. And then she rises, sword recovered, and unfolds back into the posture of a champion. She hoists her sword into the sky and turns it into a searchlight, her eyes roving the stands opposite her team for _something._ The excitement whirling Qrow’s stomach spins down into fear—he knows what she’s looking for. A Nevermore mask of white bone and red paint among a slew of ruddy faces. Black feathers draped over crimson robes. A body that is hers but older, stronger, crueler.

_Don’t do this, Raven. Please don’t have brought them here. We’re supposed to make this choice together._

But then she turns their way. Sheathes her sword. An aftershock of applause breaks over the arena and Raven runs. She runs for her team—her brother, her best friend, her partner—and they run for her until they’re close enough to see the tears shining in her eyes and her brilliant, warm, victorious smile as she throws out her arms to meet them.

They surround her, but she sees only her partner at the center, beaming for her. She launches at him with the last of her waning strength and lets him steady her, lets him stare one breathless moment before she locks him in a kiss and the cameras show it to the world.

Summer nearly shrieks, clapping like a seal, but Qrow just looks on in shock because Raven _knows._ Raven knows the whole world of Remnant watches the Vytal Festival Tournament, which means she knows just how far this will reach. Yet she doesn’t stop. She winds her arms around Tai’s neck and lets him cradle her, kisses him not like it’s the last chance she’ll get but one of the first, like this is only their bright rupture of a beginning instead of the final rise before the end.

There are no Branwens in the audience, Qrow realizes. They’re on their own. They can go with Oz like he offered, be something greater than themselves. He’s still not sure how he feels about that, with the semblance he has, but somehow, he can sense a weight easing from his shoulders, cutting at the heavy feeling in his chest.

He turns to Summer, who is now staring out at the crowd, doing her best to give her teammates their moment together, and a tiny smile twitches at his lips. He will never have to kill this girl—one day, she will be the hero he dreams to be.

So long as her curse of a partner keeps his distance in the field.

But this is not the battlefield, right now. Raven won. They won’t fight again until their second-year missions in the early Spring. So he isn’t afraid to throw his arm around his partner’s shoulders and bring her in against his side.

“Hey Birdbrain,” she says. She smiles up at him, silver eyes crinkled to perfect crescent moons. “We did it.”

“We sure did.”

She embraces him fully, pressing her cheek into the top of his chest, and he lets himself hold onto her, this girl who somehow believes in him. One hand comes to rest in her hair, the other on the curve of her back, cinching what little distance she’d left between them. He could lean down and kiss the top of her head, if he wanted to. Slip a finger under her chin, tilt her face, bring his—

—then two more pairs of arms slip over them, crushing any rogue thoughts he had of kissing Summer Rose.

“We’re going out tonight,” Raven declares, voice muffled by her team’s bodies all pressed together. “And the rest of you are paying for me.”

Four tones of laughter break into chorus. What a weird, messy knot they are. STRQ. A cut above the rest, a relief against the status quo. It suits them, in all their different strains of oddness, these misshapen pieces that somehow fit together.

There is no question anymore. They will choose to keep fighting. They will choose each other.

+

The twins don’t return to Mistral for the break—there’s no reason to. Even if the tribe hadn’t left them, there was no going back. They’re the top Team in the world, trainees on its most vital mission. But they’re also in desperate need of rest. Oz offers to train them on their break, let them stay in the dorms, so long as they take at least a week or two of respite. “To recharge your tired auras,” he tells them, “and your minds.”

So Tai and Summer bring them to Patch. It’s a tiny island, where you can feel the breeze from the ocean even in the thick of the forest. They stay with Tai’s parents—an older couple, working as a teacher and a nurse—in a house near the Eastern shoreline, switching off between the couches and the guest room. Tai’s parents already know Summer, but they dote on Raven and Qrow as if they knew them all the same. It’s strange and foreign, seeing what a normal family is like. But when Tai’s mom fixes his coffee in the morning, and his dad helps him work on Harbinger, he decides it’s not the worst thing in the world. At least, he can see why Summer misses it.

In those two weeks their team spends huddled around the fireplace, chasing each other through the snowfall, sneaking onto Signal’s training grounds to keep themselves sharp, Qrow watches his sister fall in love.

Different as they are, Tai and Raven make sense. Where she sharpens him, he softens her jagged edges. They protect each other, complement each other—they’re the model of that synergy Oz talked about on the first day.

Love doesn’t weaken Raven. In fact, it seems to make her stronger.

But that, too, makes sense. Love is at the core of her semblance—she can only use it on the people she bonds to, the people she cares enough about to keep watch over. There’s no doubt she can make portals to Tai, now. Maybe even Summer, who still holds some supernatural power to make her all girly and gossipy, and is currently responsible for the veneer of shiny pink on her fingernails.

Qrow’s semblance, on the other hand, only makes love impossible.

There have been a few instances since that first day with his partner in the Emerald Forest—runaway lightning that nearly struck her on the roof one night, a beam that fell in a shed on a field trip, a broken ankle after a too-quick turn in a doubles combat exam. She never blames him. Still, stubbornly, she believes is semblance is something yet to be unlocked, hunkered under layers of aura and “smushed-down feelings”, as Summer likes to call the thoughts that keep him up during the night. One day, he thinks she’ll admit he’s bad luck, but that day won’t come anytime soon.

It’s almost cruel of her, to draw him in the way she does. With all those soft, forgiving smiles, those featherlight touches on his shoulders, his hands, the tender pulse points of his wrists. Beneath her competitive spark, there is only kindness. He cannot blame her for wanting to save him.

But he can blame himself for thinking he could ever give her more.

  1. _Icarus, pirouetting beneath the sun_



The team’s first examination mission comes in the spring of their second year, when Ozpin sends them deep into the forests of Southern Vale on a scouting track to look for any upticks in Grimm activity—it’s easily the most dangerous of the missions assigned to second years, especially without a professional to guide them. Luckily, Summer and her team can handle dangerous. The weight of the place is what worries her. She knows their survey zone isn’t far from her childhood village, which is hardly likely to have been rebuilt in the twelve years since it was destroyed.

The distance shocks her, sometimes. Twelve years since that night in the cellar. Twelve years since the world burned and Summer woke up in the ashes. She doesn’t know how she’ll handle it, if they happen across the ruins of the place where she was born. But at least she has her team. Tai’s gentle hands. Raven’s reason. Qrow’s strong arms pulling her in, giving her a warmth that lets her disappear.

She wants him. She decided that much during the Vytal Tournament. Not because he chose to stay at Beacon, but because for the first time during the team rounds, he fought at her side without hesitation—he didn’t think about the bad luck. While Raven and Tai were across the arena, there was just the two of them, back to back, trading rhythms and techniques like they were built for each other, and she had the scary thought that maybe they _were._

And then the thought wasn’t scary anymore. It was soft. Comforting. In the quiet reaches of her Haven dorm room, under the cover of the night, falling for Qrow Branwen felt as safe as he did.

But it’s not. He doesn’t want her like she wants him. He has far too many admirers—a whole slew of students Raven is usually the one to fend off—to settle for just one.

Summer has to force herself to focus. So far on their mission, the trail has been quiet. The only rustles in the brush have come from docile animals—quick-footed foxes and tottering birds. Rain, cold and pouring, bats the newly sprouted blossoms from the trees, coating the forest floor in a blanket of white petals. Summer leads the team’s procession, Raven not far behind her, and the boys round out the back, squabbling about which one of them has had to carry more supplies. 

“Looks like the forest is getting thicker up there,” says Summer. “Should we try to switch paths?”

“Aren’t we supposed to be looking for Grimm?” Raven counters. “I’d say dark and creepy is the best place to find them.”

“Oh. Right.”

Tai speaks up. “What was Oz thinking, sending us all the way out here? I’ve heard Huntsmen have been avoiding this place for months.”

“You heard what he said,” Qrow cuts in. “We’re set to be the ‘strongest team to graduate Beacon.’ We can take care of this.”

“If we make it out alive to graduate,” Tai grumbles.

“Don’t be such a fatalist, Tai,” says Raven. “That’s my job.”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s mine,” says Qrow.

Summer rolls her eyes. “Just when I think you three have run out of things to bicker about, you always find a way to surprise me.”

“Maybe that’s really our job,” Qrow quips, and Summer turns over her shoulder just in time to catch him winking at her.

“Our _job_ is to finish this survey and get the hell back to Beacon.”

“I’m sorry, was that profanity I heard from our fearless leader?” Raven teases.

“That was a C-rank cuss at best,” says Tai. “I’ve been trying to rile a ‘fuck’ out of Summer since we were like, thirteen.”

Raven greets that with a cough. “You’ve been trying to what now?”

“Babe, you know I mean the word.”

“Too late, Tai. You’ve pissed her off,” says Qrow. “Now only three of us are getting out of here alive.”

“None of us will be getting out of here if you don’t quit acting like children.”

“Zip your lips, everybody,” says Qrow, moving up to Summer’s side. “The Princess has spoken.”

He bends down for a second, scooping a fistful of wet, white flowers, and drops them onto Summer’s head. “Your crown, your majesty.”

She shakes the flowers out of her hair and yanks up her hood, but not before flicking him hard on the forehead. “You’re the worst.”

He grins at her, which fills her stomach with the same unwelcome fluttering she felt the first time she saw him. One of these days, she's going to have to do something about these feelings. But for now, she shoves to the back of her mind and keeps walking. 

The team passes into the canopied stretch of the path, and the thickness of the trees filters the rain to little more than a trickle. As she walks, Summer takes a moment to wring the moisture from her cloak. Droplets trail from the fabric in a line, over grass, onto—

She bites down a shriek. There’s what looks like a fox carcass, mangled and freshly bleeding, sprawled beside her boots.

“Guys, come look at this,” she says, voice quavering.

Raven steps up first. “That’s new. Probably hasn’t been dead an hour.”

“Which means whatever killed it isn’t far,” says Qrow.

“We don’t have to fight them, right? Just lay low, observe and count?” Summer asks.

“Yeah, but we’ll be ready just in case,” says Tai. He flexes his hand, and his gauntlets zip down over his arm, encasing his fingers.

Summer fits her hands on her scabbards and leads her team forward, into deeper shadows. The day has just lapsed into the afternoon, but in this part of the forest, it feels like night: everything is blue and black and she can’t help but suffer a prickling sensation of being watched, as if a cold hand has spread its fingers across her back.

The beating of wings stirs the silence. Summer looks into the flanking woods, through the darkening tunnels made by the leaning trees, but there’s nothing. _It’s just another bird,_ she tells herself. _You like birds._

She walks faster.

When the quiet returns, she takes stock of her team. Tai walks close to Raven, fists ready at his sides. Raven’s sword is sheathed, but she keep her fingers locked around the hilt. Qrow has his scythe drawn, handle balanced on his shoulders. He catches her watching and offers her a reassuring smile.

Her eyes trail above his head, and her breath lodges in her throat. Six red eyes stare out of the dark.

“Summer?”

She draws Cress from its holster. “Three for the count,” she whispers.

The eyes blink closed, and movement rattles the canopy. A few gaps in the trees reveal bodies of shadow and bone flitting overhead. Summer folds Cress into its gun form and slides out the long-range extension. Its aim follows the flock of Grimm (at least, she thinks they’re Grimm) to the path before them.

They land in the shape of an arrow—three of them, just as she thought. These Grimm are taller than all of them, with the physiques of muscled men and heads of insects, black wings fanning out from their backs. Their ribs thrust outside their bodies, the white bone stained not with Grimm markings but fresh blood, red as their bulbous eyes. They move slowly, mandibles clicking, sizing up their prey.

“Hawkmoths,” Summer exhales. They’re humanoid-class Grimm, like Seraphae and Apathy, but physically much stronger. She didn’t even think they lived on Vale.

The first Hawkmoth launches forward, talons out, and Summer screams for her team to fire. Dust explodes at her back as silver light lances over the Hawkmoths, slowing them down. She grabs Lune and throws herself into one of them. The blade jabs up through its neck, and the Hawkmoth lets out an ear-shattering screech. Summer winces as she pulls out the sword. She shoots it in the gut for good measure, and the Hawkmoth’s burly body sloughs into dust.

Raven and Qrow move for the other two. Raven lands only a shallow slash along the stomach before hers leaps back into the trees. Qrow, ironically, has slightly better luck in shooting out its eyes. Still, it flies out of reach. Summer takes aim at it, pulls Cress’s trigger. When it falls, Qrow plunges Harbinger’s blade between its ribs.

“Nice work,” Summer says.

Qrow recovers his sword. Black dust swirls a tornado at his feet. “Yeah, but we’ve still got one at large.”

The four of them stare above their heads, following the places the leaves shake. Qrow and Summer aim. Raven and Tai stand guard. Summer can hear her pulse thundering in her ears, but she keeps her hands as steady as she can on her weapons.

The Hawkmoth drops closest to Tai, and he drives a fistful of fire dust into its chest. It tries to fight back, clawing at his shoulders, his back, but Tai just throws punch after punch until finally, the Hawkmoth drops. Tai crushes its mandible with his boot, then shoves a right hook beneath his jaw to throw it into the nearest tree. It dissolves on impact.

Tai brushes his palms together. “I think we should run, now.”

“Good plan,” says Summer.

They take off down the path, which only leads to darker shadows. At the front, Summer can barely see at all. But it isn’t wise to stop and gather their lanterns. Not when more Hawkmoths could be around.

As if on cue, the trees shiver, and teardrops of red pierce the darkness. Summer doesn’t get the chance to count all of them before another swarm of Hawkmoths tears for them,

One’s wing cuts at her back, throwing her to the ground. She rolls to her feet and fires Cress, but misses. It’s too dark to see them when they’re not looking at her.

A shoulder knocks against hers, and she jumps, fearing one of the Hawkmoths, but it’s just Raven. Like their enemies’, her eyes fluoresce red in the dark.

“What do we do?” Raven asks.

Summer peers into the swarm. “I think I’ve got an idea.”

“Everyone, at each other’s backs,” she calls to her team. “We need to keep firing—if we can’t aim, we can at least throw them off.”

The team moves together, their bodies bounding the space of a four-pointed star.

“We need light!” Raven cries. “Tai!”

Tai cracks his fists together. His semblance, Luminescence, covers his arms in a glow like pure sunlight. The light washes over them, flashing in the eyes of the Hawkmoths.

And then there are tens more of them rocketing out of the trees, drawn in by Tai’s glow.

“I don’t think we needed the light, Raven!” Tai calls. He throws his burning fists at each Grimm that flies towards him. Raven breaks formation to step in front of him, slicing at any Hawkmoth he misses. Still, she cannot fully protect them. There are too many of them now, screeching and swarming, hungering for light and flesh.

Summer turns to Qrow just as a Hawkmoth clamps its Talons around his neck. His eyes jolt wide, full of fear and angry light. “Qrow!” she cries out. She tries to move for him, but there are claws on her arms, in her hair, black wings thundering at her back.

Qrow mouths her name, and it’s like that night in the cellar all over again. She’s losing him. She loves him. She loves all of them. And if she cannot save them now, they’re all going to die.

Something awakens in her. She can feel it, this second soul of hers, warmth unfurling in her veins like the petals of a rose. It is soft, but sharp. It is dangerous. It is love made to gunpowder, burning hot as the tears filling up her eyes, turning the boy she loves into nothing but an ash-colored blur.

Summer lets loose a scream, and the world catches on silver fire.

+

Qrow can’t look at Summer. He’s afraid if he does, then the blankets around her will stop their legato rise and fall, that her shallow breaths will drop into silence. It could happen, with his luck. After the Hawkmoth attack, it’s a miracle any of them survived. It’s _her_ miracle.

He remembers silver. Twin supernovas, coming from her eyes. And then the Hawkmoths were gone, shattered into thin air like tiny bits of glass, and Summer was limp on the ground, barely breathing and knocked out cold. He carried her. He should’ve let Tai do it, someone whose bad luck didn’t bring those Hawkmoths there in the first place, but Qrow needed her there in his arms. Needed to feel her weakly breathing, to know she was alive.

He didn’t let her go until they made it to camp, and they didn’t make it to camp until sunset.

So now, instead of watching for Summer to wake up, he stares out of the tent and over the ridge where they’ve camped, losing himself in the way sunset beams away the clouds, coloring the trees in washes of orange and purple. Raven and Tai have gone to get firewood—and probably ‘mess around,’ as Raven still calls their very official relationship—but he doesn’t understand how they could do anything but stew in what happened this afternoon.

Qrow has had near death experiences before, but nothing like that. Nothing Summer almost couldn’t save them from.

“What are you doing over there?” a tiny voice calls out from the tent.

Qrow jerks his head, and his heart jumps into his throat in relief. Summer is awake and slowly easing herself into a sitting position, her blankets pooling in her lap.

“Hey Quicksilver,” he says, and the name has never felt more right. “Good to have you back.”

She blinks a few times, like she’s making sure it’s really him. “Do you have to sit so far away, Qrow?”

His eyes go to the ground. “I thought that’d be better for you, me away.”

“Well, it’s not,” she says. “Can you come help me with my blankets?”

He sighs and dips back into the tent. “What do you need, Munchkin?”

She gently taps her shoulders. “Over my shoulders, please. All of them.”

“You sure your legs are fine?”

“I’m sure.”

Obliging, Qrow pulls the blankets out of her lap and drapes them over her shoulders, giving her the appearance of wearing three cloaks instead of just one. Then she promptly takes the second one off, and he doesn’t have the heart to resist her when she wraps it around him.

“You looked cold,” she says. “Did you get a count for the survey?”

He shakes his head. “They’re all dead, Summer,” he says. “Whatever you did with your eyes…it vaporized them.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“What do you remember?”

“Burning,” she says, and the wild look in her eye tells him she’s seeing it all over again.

She forces a swallow. “Do you think that’s what I did, when I was just a little girl?” she asks him. She starts to pull at her knuckles, and Qrow closes his hands over hers to still them. “Do you think that’s why I survived that night?”

He shrugs, and the blanket slips off his shoulders. “I don’t know, Summer. But it’s a good hypothesis.” He pauses a moment, searching her face. There’s something oddly calm about it, for all they’ve been through today. Some sliver of daring within him lets him reach up a hand to brush away her long bang, tuck it behind her ear. “You know, maybe you’re the one who needs extra training for your semblance.”

That gets a whisper of a laugh out of her, which satisfies him enough, but frightens him a little when she leans into his palm. She’s just tired is all. She’s earned the right to be.

“Where are Raven and Tai?” she asks.

Qrow nods outside of the tent. “Collecting firewood.”

“So…canoodling.”

“You know how they are.”

She places a hand over his on her cheek and pulls it away. A quick flicker of shame rushes through him—he knows he overstepped. But to his surprise, she simply turns his palm out and leaves a petal-soft kiss on the back of his hand. Heat feathers over his cheeks.

“Thank you,” she whispers, lacing their fingers together.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, trying his best not to stammer. “You’re the one who saved us all today.”

“I’m not really sure what this power is, with my eyes,” she starts, “but I know I unlocked it because I thought I was going to lose you.”

His heart drops into his stomach. He can’t let this happen. As much as it should bring him joy, knowing this incredible girl cares so deeply for him, he is mostly afraid. Afraid of what could come of it, and afraid of how easy it’d be to just give himself over to her—he’d never want to let go.

A few tears slip down her cheeks, and he cups her chin in his hands and brushes them away with his thumbs. She gazes at him, silver eyes glistening with tears and that frightening affection she has for him, and he’s helpless. Absolutely gone. His heart is pounding and his hands are quivering on her face, so he brings his fingers down to clasp her neck.

“You’re a brave girl, Summer Rose,” he says. “But you don’t have to go throwing yourself into danger all the time.”

“I do for you.”

She leans closer to him, bracing her hands on his biceps. He lets her touch their foreheads, their noses. His breath rushes over her lips in staccato. What little distance between them crackles with electricity, more powerful than any dust. But they can’t do this. This is the quickest way to disaster. To tragedy.

They close their eyes. Tilt their heads. He can feel her shaking in his grip, but he knows he isn’t doing much better.

“Hey. You don’t want this,” he whispers. “You don’t want me this close to you.”

“No,” she says, tugging on the sleeves of his shirt. “I want you closer.”

His lips are cold against hers, but she doesn’t seem to mind as she pulls him in, kissing him like she’s been dreaming about it. He certainly has. So he shoves his doubt aside and kisses her back, sliding his hands into her hair, letting his fingers curl in the soft strands. He’d tell her to slow down, but the eagerness of her kiss lights a fire in him. Her hands slide up his arms and over his shoulders, coming to rest on the exposed ridges of his collarbones. She drums her fingers there, and the gentle playfulness of her touch makes him shiver.

Summer leans away from him, if only by an inch, and he hates himself for already wanting more of her. “Tell me this is real, Qrow,” she says, breathlessly. “Tell me I won’t be just another one of your girls.”

“There’s no other girls, Summer,” he says, and for once, it’s true. “Only you.”

He captures her lips again and kisses her slowly, languidly, making her sigh against his mouth. She bends her body closer, aching for him, and he takes it as a cue to grab her by the small of her back and draw her into his lap. He leaves one last, fiery kiss on her lips before moving to kiss her chin, the slope of her jaw, the length of her neck down to the collar of her dress. The feeling of his mouth on her skin has her curling her fingers into the fabric of his shirt, arching her hips into his. He craves the friction of it; he didn’t know how badly he really wanted her until he got a taste of her.

Tai and Raven can take their time in the woods—he’ll take his with Summer, unraveling her until they both have come undone.

But then she jerks away from him, breathing heavily. “Qrow, I…”

“Summer? Was that not okay?”

“No, I mean…yes. It was _better_ than okay. I just…wow. You. Wow.”

He meets her stammering with a smirk. “Speechless, huh?”

She smacks him lightly on the shoulder. “Shut up, Birdbrain,” she says. “I just need to catch my breath, oh my _gods._ ”

Qrow fights a chuckle and holds out his hand. “Come on,” he says. “I think you’re going to like the sunset from here.”

+

The next time Summer Rose holds Qrow Branwen’s hand, it’s on their way to Ozpin’s office. She’s going in alone—that much she insisted on. But she wasn’t about to make the walk without her best moral support.

She does a quick sweep of the hallway, just to make sure no one is watching them, before rising on her tiptoes and pressing a kiss to Qrow’s cheek. “You’ll be waiting for me?”

“Of course.”

Holding her partner’s smile in her mind, Summer opens the doors. Ozpin is inside, waiting for her. Wordlessly, he gestures for her to take a seat in front of his desk, and as always, she obeys.

“I came here to ask you about my eyes,” she tells him.

“Then let me ask you something first, Miss Rose,” Ozpin says, and the faint smile he gives her reaches all the way to his eyes.

“What’s your favorite fairy tale?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed :) I had an absolute blast writing this one. I love exploring Raven's softer side, STRQ's dynamic, and coming up with new Grimm (like come on guys, they've got to have Mothmen Grimm at some point. HARBINGERS of the SILVER bridge? Yeah. That's setting off all my English major allusion alarms). Anyway, thanks for reading, and if you want to keep up with my progress, follow me on Twitter @lumailia .


	3. circulations 7-9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I told you there was "mild to moderate spicy incoming" and it is here. Along with fluff. And angst. Everything you're here for, right? I've also updated the tags and description too, but that's all marginal stuff.
> 
> ALSO for future reference, this is a vignette-style story, so things are getting ready to get a little more time-skippy from here on out.

  1. _to light the kindling, and reap the sparks_



For the past four years, Summer Rose has called her team’s corner room at Beacon Academy home—which makes it strange to see it all in boxes. As of this morning, their graduation exams are over, and in just a few short days, they’ll receive their graduation medallions and official licenses to become bona-fide professional Huntsmen. Summer finds her time here, with all its twists and turns, has felt like a blink and an eternity at once.

The door opens. Summer doesn’t turn around, but at this point, she knows all her teammates by their footsteps; it’s Tai behind her, slinking closer to where she sits at her desk picking eraser shavings and crumpled-up flashcards out of the drawers. She finds it strange Tai hasn’t said anything, since he’s definitely seen her. Then his footsteps pick up, and she knows exactly what’s coming.

“Tai, I can hear you moving faster,” she says. “Don’t do it.”

He grabs the hood of her cloak and yanks it up, dragging it all the way over her nose. “Too late!”

She swats him away and throws off her hood. “You’re such an ass.”

“Come on, I’ve got a surprise for you.”

Summer turns in her chair. Tai is holding four even cuts of photo paper, splayed backside up in his hand like playing cards. A smile pulls at her lips.

“Are those the photos from our last exam mission?”

“Sure are,” he says, laying them face down on the desk. “I went into town to have the group shot printed. Four copies, one for each of us.”

She picks up one of the photos, and her smile widens. They stand in team formation, Summer herself leaning against a tree while Tai flanks the other side of it. Raven stands strong beside Tai, hand forever curled around her sword, and at the end of the line, Qrow stares smugly into the camera, weapon slung over his back. He looks so much like he did the first time she saw him, all handsome and confident and ruffed for danger.

She’s glad she knows his softer side. It feels like carrying a precious secret: having memories of him in his more vulnerable moments, knowing how gentle his rough-hewn hands can be.

Tai sits himself on the edge of Summer’s desk and nabs his own copy of the photo, pinching it between his fingers. He studies it fondly. “We’ve come a long way from our Signal days, huh?”

“And yet you’re still wearing cargo pants.”

“Hey,” he says, grabbing at one of his generous pockets, “these are my brand, okay? Would you ever ditch your cloak?”

She taps a finger against her chin. “Hm. Maybe if I had a good reason to.”

“I swear, I can never get a simple yes or no answer out of you.”

Summer rolls her eyes and returns to studying the photo. Her gaze drifts to Qrow, as usual, and she notices the camera’s flash has caught on something at his collarbone—a silver cross, strung sideways on a leather chain.

“That’s new,” Summer mutters. “Hey Tai, when did Qrow get this necklace?”

“On that mission, maybe?” he says, squinting at his own photo. “I don’t know. You’re his girlfriend.”

“You’re his _best_ friend.”

“That implies Raven tells you things she doesn’t tell me.”

Summer shrugs. “Maybe she does,” she says. “Where are they, anyway?”

“Raven is hunting down a janitor to fix that dead bulb in the bathroom, and Qrow—you know, I don’t know where he is.”

“Probably getting himself into trouble,” Summer remarks, fondness softening her words. “Or training with the Headmaster.”

“You ever think that’s weird? How Oz’s kind of fixated on all of us?”

“We’re the strongest team, right? He just wants us to see our potential,” Summer suggests. “Besides, Qrow would never admit it, but he tends to need extra attention. You know, because he’s such a pessimist.”

Tai’s lips curl up in a smirk. “Yeah, I can’t imagine you two are really _training_ up there on the roof anymore.”

“We are!” Summer squeaks. “And I’m still kicking his ass, in case he’s tried to tell you otherwise.”

“You see, I thought you were always coming back to the room sweaty for a _much_ different reason.”

A blush explodes over Summer’s cheeks, and she sinks back into her cloak. “No, Tai. Gods. We haven’t even…you know what? We’re ending this conversation right now.”

She jumps out of her seat and crosses to one of her boxes, hoping refolding her clothes will help her ignore the implications of Tai’s comments.

“Hold on,” Tai presses, and Summer wishes her semblance had been to turn invisible, instead. “You’re telling me you and Qrow haven’t found a favorite closet yet?”

“It’s a personal thing, okay?” Summer stammers. “There are some nerves.”

Tai pumps his brows again. “Do tell me more.”

Summer huffs—this boy is relentless. “You know what he thinks his semblance is,” she says. “And how it might…effect things. With me.”

“You mean he’s afraid he can’t—”

“Tai, if you finish that sentence, I will throw you out the window.”

Tai holds up his hands. “Okay, okay,” he says, hopping down off her desk. “All I’m saying is that if you and Qrow happen to need the room on graduation night, Raven and I can make other arrangements.”

Summer figures her whole body must be red by now. “Tai. Shut up.” 

Before Tai can dole out another quip, the dorm room door unlocks and Qrow—the _last_ person Summer wants to see her mortified like this—steps inside.

“You guys busy?” he asks.

“Just packing up the rom,” Tai says. “Did you see your sister anywhere?”

“Yeah, actually. She was in a mood, headed into town. Apparently maintenance is out of lightbulbs.”

Tai lets out a sigh. “I hope she hurries.”

He crosses the room and closes himself inside the dark, windowless bathroom. His voice comes muffled from behind the door. “I am really tired of using my semblance whenever I have to pee.”

Qrow and Summer share a good laugh at that—Tai’s embarrassment works wonders to ease Summer’s own.

And as Qrow comes closer, her thoughts shift entirely. His uniform tie is loose, the first two buttons of his shirt undone, giving Summer full view of the cross hanging around his neck. In the picture, she thought it was made of silver, but up close, it appears white, like the metal has been lacquered over, maybe by his own hand. She can only wonder why.

“What have you got there?” he asks her, nodding to the box on the edge of her bed.

She takes a quick glance down before returning her gaze to his necklace. “Pajamas, I think.”

“You ready for Friday?”

“I mean, it’s everything I’ve ever trained for,” she replies. “The medal, the license…there were so many times I thought I wasn’t going to make it that far.”

“Come on, half-pint. You know if anyone deserves a Huntsman license, it’s you.”

“For such a pessimist, you really do know how to cheer a girl up.”

He lifts her chin with a hooked finger. “Only because I hate to see you with a frown.”

He closes his eyes and brings their smiles together. The kiss is chaste, no different from the ones they’ll share between classes or before bed, but she senses a kind of yearning in it—whether on her end or his, she isn’t sure.

They break apart, and over Qrow’s shoulder, Summer spots Tai ducking quietly out of the room. A blush spreads over her face again.

Qrow tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear, and she knows he must feel the heat coming off her skin. “You good?”

“Yeah,” she stammers. “I think I need to get back to packing.”

“Want any help?”

She shakes her head. “I’m okay.”

He leans in closer, and she tries to distract herself with the shadows his eyelashes make on his cheeks. “What’s on your mind, Sum?”

“I just really like you,” she blurts. “That’s all.”

That pulls a feather of a laugh from his chest. “I really like you, too,” he says. He draws his hand away from her face to trace his fingers down her neck, over her shoulder, along the contour of her back, and Summer finds herself holding her breath. For two years they’ve been touching each other like this, learning the parts of each other they’ve had the comfort to reveal, and he still manages to set her heart racing like it’s that first evening in the tent all over again.

He edges closer. She moves in to kiss him, hoping this is going somewhere, that she was right to taste that yearning in his kiss, but his lips fall instead on the shell of her ear.

“Can I tell you something?” he asks, his voice falling into a smooth, low timbre that covers Summer’s skin in blissful chills.

She slides an arm over his shoulder, rests her hand at the scruffy nape of his neck. “Always.”

“I think I love you,” he says, pressing another kiss to the tender skin beneath her ear, “and it scares the shit out of me.”

She freezes. “Is that bad?” is all she can manage to whisper, with his _I think I love you_ set on loop in her head. She feels like she might collapse, if it weren’t for his arm now locked around her waist, steadying her legs against the edge of the bed.

“No,” he says, and she feels his hair scratch her cheek when he shakes his head. “I don’t think this is bad, for once.”

She wants to respond, to tell him she _knows_ she loves him, that she’s known since that night in the forests of Southern Vale, that night she almost lost him, but before she can puzzle out the words, he’s pulling her into him, covering her lips with his own. She tilts her head to deepen the kiss, praying it’s enough of an _I love you_ , for now. He steps a bit closer, just so her hips press into his thighs, and gravity knocks her down onto the bed.

Qrow doesn’t follow her. But his eyes are half-lidded, like at any second, he might. “I’m going to go find Tai,” he tells her, giving her leg a squeeze.

Then he leaves her there on the bed, dizzy and breathless and thinking he’s going to be the death of her.

+

Graduation day at Beacon Academy might as well be a holiday for the whole kingdom of Vale. The shops close, the streets fill with vendors and musicians once the parade rolls through, the facades of every building wear at least a flash of bold crimson and luminous gold. And at night, when the graduates really start to celebrate, the Procession of Lights transforms the kingdom into a field of burning stars.

The Procession of Lights was started by the first King of Vale, the very King who helped found the Academies. According to the tradition, each lantern tossed into the sky represents a soul moving forward, shining from one stage of life into the next, and with graduation falling at the end of winter, the tradition soon spread to rest of the kingdom, turning the promotion of a small class of two-hundred into a mass celebration of rebirth. 

At their dinner tables in the courtyard, the graduates still keep their lanterns on the tables, held down by tiny bags of sand. Qrow plays absently with the strings on one of them, looking for something to keep his right hand busy while one of the waiters refills his glass. His other hand sits on Summer’s surprisingly bare knee. He isn’t sure why she’s decided on a night this cold to finally ditch the tights, but he definitely doesn’t mind it.

He watches her dip an ice cube into her mouth and roll it against her cheek. She looks beautiful tonight—as she always does, if he’s the one you’re asking—with her hair pinned to one side by intricate silver hairclips, her cheeks and eyelids dusted in white glitter. The fabric of her dress is a rich plum red, a sharp detour from the white and gray of her hunting clothes, and the long sleeves billow loosely at her wrists. It’s gorgeous on her, yet his mind keeps drifting to an image of him taking her out of it, undoing every one of those black velvet stays that lace the front together.

Face reddening, he looks into the lantern. The waiter places his wine glass back on the table, and he quickly takes a sip of it. It burns his throat a little, but in a way that he kind of likes.

“Hey, Qrow,” Tai says from across the table, and silently, Qrow thanks him for the distraction. “When did you get the rings.”

Qrow sets down his glass and shows off his right hand. “Last mission. I dumped my savings on some stuff to spice up my outfit.”

“They look boring,” Raven says. She recently added jewelry to her own dress—a few strands of red and onyx beads, now paired with her low-necked evening gown.

“Really? Because one of them is for you,” Qrow says. He’d intended to keep the meaning of the rings a mystery, but now that Tai’s brought them up, he supposes he owes them all an explanation.

He points to the two thin bands on his right ring finger. “I got rings for my team. These here are for you and Tai, my sister and teammate.” He moves next to pinch the thicker, white stone ring on his index. “And this one is for my partner. This way, no matter where my missions take me, I’ve always got my team on my side.”

Summer takes his hand in both of hers. She runs a thumb over the ring, admires the way it shimmers opalescent before the lantern. “That’s so beautiful, Qrow,” she says, then gives his shoulder a nudge with her own. “I didn’t know you had it in you to be so sentimental.”

“Well, you know I like to surprise.”

She draws his hand up to her lips and kisses the ring, then the back of his hand, and he wonders why it’s always the tiniest things from her, those little kisses and caresses she leaves on him like it’s instinct, that make an absolute mess of him.

“Hey Tai, I think the band’s playing that song you like,” Raven says, grabbing Tai’s arm. “Let’s go dance.”

As they get up, Raven gives her brother a wink, and he knows he has a decision to make: either sit here and drink until the lantern lights blur, or see if Summer wants what he does, to ditch this party they’ve snuck into every year and go get lost in each other.

Absently, he draws his left hand up from her knee along the inside of her thigh. Summer gasps, but she doesn’t ask him to stop. He inches his hand higher, just past the hem of her dress. She turns to him, her gaze simmering, heavy breaths moving her chest.

“Do you want to get out of here?” he whispers. He pulls his lantern closer to him and slips the sandbag into his open palm.

“You read my mind,” she replies.

With a grin, he gives Summer her lantern and takes her hand, and they go running back to the dorms, laughing like they’re still just kids with nothing to lose.

+

“Where are we going?” Summer exclaims.

“You’ll see.”

After nearly melting her into a puddle with a single touch out at their table, Qrow is leading her up the dark backstairs of their dormitory building with only the light of their Procession lanterns to guide them. She’s thankful she didn’t wear heels— _stupid ladies’ stilts—_ but much of her relief is lost to the frantic fluttering of her heart.

He wants her. That’s what this all has to be. He’s found some quiet corner where no one can find them, and he’s going to make her racier daydreams into something real.

She hopes they’re almost to where they’re going, because she thinks her knees are about to give out.

They burst through the door and onto the roof. This isn’t their usual training spot, but a place higher up, at the top of one of the towers. A bulb of stone and steel arcs over their heads, guarding them from most of the nighttime wind.

Qrow leads her out to the tower balcony. From here, they can see the first graduate lanterns being tossed into the sky, joining the full chorus of them that stretches across the city, the forest, even leaking into the water as fisherman and gondoliers set loose lights of their own. It looks as though the world is brushed in fire dust, and it makes Summer believe in magic beyond Oz’s maidens and the reflection of her eyes.

“I just though we’d pick a new angle for this year,” Qrow says. “Since we’re used to watching it all from the ground.”

“It’s incredible,” she exhales.

“You want to let ours go?”

“I figure here’s as good a place as any for it,” replies.

They untie their sandbags, letting them drop to the ground before stepping over them and leaning over the stone railing, lanterns still fit between their hands. Summer counts to three, and they toss their lanterns up towards the stars. For a second, they float alone, two souls on top of the world, and then the wind carries them out towards the forest, where the other graduates’ lanterns have slowly begun to drift.

“Are we supposed to make a wish?” Summer asks.

“I don’t know,” Qrow says. “But I don’t think anyone will stop you, if you want to.”

Summer smiles and shuts her eyes. She wishes for her partner beside her—and their two teammates down below—to be with her forever. Then she prays that the gods will be kind and grant her wish.

As she opens her eyes again, Qrow’s hand comes to rest on the small of her back, his thumb tracing slow, lazy circles. “Did you make your wish?” he asks.

“I did,” she replies. “Did you make one?”

“I’m not sure how I feel about wishes,” he says. He takes his eyes from the lanterns and gazes at her, looking what has to be the softest she’s ever seen him. “Besides, right now, I think I’ve got everything I need.”

Her heart stops, and she’s in his arms before it beats again. He leans down, she lifts herself onto her toes, and when they kiss, it’s like lightning is dancing down her body—between the wind and his warmth and the fervent movement of his lips against hers, nothing has ever made her feel more alive. She curls her fingers in his hair and yanks him even closer, bridging any miniscule space left between their bodies.

She really, _really_ hopes that wish will come true.

Qrow gives her a moment to breathe, though it leaves her aching for his lips again, and moves his head to kiss her jaw, down her neck to the hollow of her collarbone. When he leaves a kiss just above the bustline of her dress, his hands dip lower too, and Summer takes a sharp breath.

“Did you just touch my butt?” she exclaims.

His responding laugh whispers over her skin as he raises his head. “You got a problem with that, Princess?”

Her face somehow turns ruddier, and her mind fills with thoughts of all the other places she wants his hands. “I don’t,” she says, her hands slipping out of his hair to reach his collarbone. Her fingers pad over the icy metal of his cross. “You never said what this one was for.”

“You’ll laugh at me.”

She lifts a brow. “Will I?”

He leans in again and whispers against her lips, “It’s supposed to ward off bad luck.”

If he’s really bracing for laughter, she only smiles. “Is it working?” she asks.

A kiss, scored with passion but far too quick for Summer’s taste. “Right now, I think so.”

Feeling brave, Summer lets her hands slide to his collar and unfastens the first closed button. “Do you want to go the room?”

“Tai and Raven won’t be there?”

“Actually, Tai promised me they wouldn’t.”

“Then lead the way.”

It takes them a little longer than usual to get back to their room—every shadowy corner seems a good place to steal a kiss, and they’re not exactly inclined to keep their hands to themselves right now. As Summer fishes the room key out of one of her dress pockets, Qrow winds his arms around her waist and works his mouth against her neck, giving her little bites that are sure to leave bruises her cloak can hide tomorrow.

The moment the door closes behind them, they collide. His lips crush against hers, and his hands tangle in her hair, undoing the three dainty clips that secure it. Summer slips off his jacket and moves to finish unbuttoning his shirt, but she gets to only two of them before he lifts her off the ground and drops her back-first onto his bed. She brings her knees up, and he slides his body between them, going to kiss the tender spot he’s just left on her neck.

“Easy there,” she says. “I will use my semblance on you.”

“No need, Sum,” he rasps, “I can take things slow all on my own.”

He connects their lips, kissing her at a tempo that has her content but also aching for more of him, for the layers between them to be gone, for their bodies to be bared as fully to each other as their hearts.

When Qrow pulls away, it’s only to admire her. The way he looks at her confirms every word he said the other day—except this time, he doesn’t seems afraid of loving her. It seems like it’s everything he wants.

“I love you,” she says, breathlessly. “I love you so much.”

The smile that breaks across his face makes her heart beat faster than any kiss could. “I love you, too, Summer Rose. Like I never knew I could.”

She grabs him by his cheeks to lead the kiss this time, bringing his hips flush against hers. As he tucks in his arms to grasp her neck, his fingers snarl in the ties on the front of her dress, loosening them. He makes a little gasp against her lips, which she likes, then moves his hand away bashfully, as if that touch had been an accident. But she doesn’t want it to be an accident. He kisses her again, clearly to distract her, and she loops her fingers around his wrist and guides their hands back to the velvet ties on her dress.

Summer parts from him, only to look him in the eyes as she unravels the first tie for him, a silent invitation for him to take the rest. And he does. Slowly. Making her breath quiver with every gentle brush of his fingers against her skin. As the ties come loose, her bodice parts down to her navel, baring much of her chest and the smooth, white curve of her stomach.

He wants to touch her. His eyes are dark looking into hers, waiting for her permission, and she gives it in the form of her hand closing over his, bringing his palm to rest against her racing heart.

“Do you feel this?” she asks. “Do you feel how fast it’s beating?”

He nods. A heavy breath fans over her lips.

“This is what you do to me,” she says. It’s so hard not to kiss him, but she wants to see what his face looks like when he’s touching her like this, to know if she can make him come apart, too.

“Gods, I’m ruining you.”

_Ruin me,_ her thoughts plead. _Ruin me, and kiss me whole._

His hands track down to grasp her legs and his mouth falls on her lips, her neck, the bony ridges beneath her collar. She arches her back, sighing, and he takes it as a cue to slide his hands beneath her skirt and up to the tops of her thighs, running a thumb under the band of her underwear. The touch sends heat racing over her body.

“Do you want this?” he whispers, face just above her chest.

Her response is shaky with adrenaline, but firm in meaning. “Yes,” she says. She’s lost track of how long she’s been wanting a night like this. “I want this.”

He peels off her dress slowly, letting her discard his shirt before falling back into her. His lips trail down her chest, her ribs, that tender point beside her hipbone, and she plunges her fingers into his hair, weakening to him in the best way she ever could.

Then their scroll tones ring out in unison, and they jump apart as quickly as they’d come together.

Qrow finds his jacket and slips the scroll from the pocket. “It’s Oz,” he says. “Says he has our first mission as licensed Huntsmen if we want it. We can take the last train out to Western Vale in an hour.”

Summer raises her eyebrows, though she’s barely able to process his words through the haze he’s left her in. “An hour?”

“Group message says Tai and Raven are in, but it’s up to our team leader.”

“Hell, let’s do it,” Summer says. “Why not start things off with a bang?”

+

When Summer wakes, she nearly forgets she’s in a rumbling tin can of a train car, with her partner’s warm, strong arms holding her close, the blankets curled around their tangled bodies. She raises up a bit, just enough to study his sleeping face. Lazily, she draws a finger along his jaw before tracing the outline of his lips—lips that now know every inch of her, it feels like.

His eyes flutter open, and he cracks a smile. “Hey, Quicksilver.”

“Hey, Birdbrain,” she says. She pushes back his hair and leaves a kiss on his forehead. “We’ll probably be at the station soon.”

“Don’t remind me,” he says. “I deserve a whole day with you in bed like this.” 

“After the mission, alright?” she proposes, and he makes a noise of reluctant agreement at the back of his throat. “Then we’ll have all the time in the world.”

  1. _love, as a kind of gravity_



Raven and Tai don’t have a wedding; Raven considers it an unnecessary formality, with too much lien going places it could be better used. But they have something like one—a “not-wedding,” as Tai names it—where everyone gathers together at their home on Patch for drinks and cake and a look at the shiny gold bands on the lovers’ fingers.

About three hours into the party, Summer finds Raven alone on the porch step, leaning her head against the post. Her back is turned, but just by the way she’s slouching, Summer can tell something is wrong. Wordlessly, she joins her in sitting on the step and staring down the driveway into the woods.

“I am so bad at parties,” Raven tells her, dryly. She doesn’t look away from the trees. “Maybe I just hate happy people.”

Summer nudges her arm. “No, you don’t. There are a lot of people in a tiny space. You’re probably just overwhelmed.”

“That’s one word for it.”

Summer places a hand on Raven’s shoulder and finds it shivering. “Rae, you’re so cold.”

“I’m not cold.”

“Then you’re nervous.”

Raven rests her hand over Summer’s. Her hands are hot—she’s been wringing them. Summer should’ve caught that habit before it started.

“Will they notice if I just fly away for a while?” Raven asks.

“I forgot you could do that now,” Summer admits, scratching her neck. “Qrow’s been restricting his Corvid power to missions.”

“Ever the purist, when it comes to that shit,” Raven remarks. “Never would’ve guessed he’d turn out to be such an upstanding Huntsman.”

“Well, you two were supposed to learn how to kill me.”

“And now we’re just taking different lives for a different man.”

Summer’s eyes tighten. “Raven, are you okay? You understand the importance of our missions, don’t you?”

Raven drops her hand. “That’s about the only thing I understand,” she says. “Gods, I never thought I wanted this.”

“Wanted what?”

“This,” she replies, nodding over her shoulder at the party winding down behind them. “Getting married, devoting my life to someone else. I didn’t want it as a kid, not even when me and Tai were first falling in love. Is it bad that I’m not sure I still do? That I’m just agreeing to this _because_ I love him? You know, my brother and I were never supposed to love anybody.”

“You told me that.”

“My mother, the tribe leader—she’s such a _bitch_ , Summer,” Raven says, and Summer tightens her grip on her best friend’s shoulder. “When I was a little girl, I asked her if she loved me. And do you know what she said? She said Branwens don’t love. We play favorites. And that if I was good, and followed her, and I was strong, I’d be her favorite one day. But not until I learned how to survive her, first.”

Summer’s shoulders drop. She doesn’t know Raven’s pain, but she wishes she could take the burden for her, give her a break for a while. The Branwens have always deserved more than a world that has been unkind to them—that’s why Ozpin gave them magic, Summer reasons. So they could have something special from the world, should Tai and Summer’s love ever run out.

But sometimes, love is asking tough questions. “Raven, you know you can tell me anything,” Summer starts, pausing to collect her courage. “Do you still love Tai?”

Raven nods. “I love him. I love him so much it hurts, sometimes, and maybe it hurts because I never thought I’d be allowed to feel it,” she confesses. “But if I’m playing favorites, I’m choosing you.”

Summer doesn’t get much of a chance to ponder what that means. The front door swings open, and Qrow and Tai step onto the porch, carrying what appears to be blankets and bottles of wine.

“We heard a rumor that the party was moving outside,” Tai exclaims. “And fortunately, Mama Xiao Long is kicking the other guests out the _back_ door.”

“Not exactly…” Summer says, but Raven stops her with a finger to her lips.

“You’d better share that blanket with me, Taiyang,” Raven says, voice tinged with an artificial brightness. “I’m freezing out here.”

“Yes ma’am,” he says, stepping closer to them. “Summer, I love you, but I’m going to have to ask you to scoot for a second so I can get to my wife.”

“Let me tell you, it is still so weird to hear him say that,” Qrow remarks.

Summer gets up, letting Tai pass onto the stairs, then Qrow. Her partner pulls the blanket around their shoulders, though he gives her most of it, and offers her the wine bottle. After one long swig of it—mostly for the warmth, instead of the swimmy feeling it gives her—she keeps the bottle locked between her knees. He’s been drinking a lot on their missions, and she’s afraid of where that might lead, if she doesn’t help him get a handle on it.

“It’s nice to have us all together as a team again,” Tai says. “Oz has been throwing us into every skeevy corner of Remnant—we can barely catch a break.”

“Maybe he should find some new students to abuse,” Raven says. Her tone is light, but Summer knows there’s weight to her words. “He got us when we were first years—surely he’s got plenty of overachieving suck-ups in his classes now.”

“If you’ll remember, sis, we only had one of those on our team,” Qrow says.

“Hey!” Summer exclaims. “My good study habits saved our asses well more than once.”

“Summer, it is still way too funny when you try to curse,” says Tai, and then all of them are giggling. Even Summer, at her own expense.

Their laughter slopes into easy silence. While Qrow leans on Summer’s shoulder, Raven and Tai look at the stars, and Summer finds herself fixated on their rings. They remind her of how her daydreams have changed. How sometimes, before she falls asleep, she thinks of a white gown and flowers and Qrow at the end of the aisle, tears in his eyes because their happy ever after is _real._ But it’s not real yet. They’re the Guardians’ top Huntsmen, which means until they can stymie the flow of Salem’s creatures, their lives are just one dangerous mission after the next.

Unless they quit. But Summer doesn’t see herself quitting anytime soon. She plans to be a Huntress for the long run, saving as many lives as she can. To Summer, being a Huntress has never been about what has to be killed—it’s about making sure the right lives get to see the aftermath.

Qrow reaches for the bottle at her legs. She swats him away. “I’m not finished,” she says, and drinks enough that maybe, he’ll forget he wants it.

When she puts the bottle down, Raven is staring at her. Summer looks into her eyes, and she hates the fear she sees there.

+

Qrow knew this night could end a lot of ways, but he never expected one of those ways to be with him carrying a very sleepy and _very_ inebriated Summer Rose on his back, all the way to their inn a mile down the road.

“I’m not used to you being the drunk one between the two of us,” he says as he angles them into the inn’s gravel driveway. He really should’ve had Tai’s parents drive them.

“Yeah, well you’ve been drinking too much anyway, Birdbrain,” Summer slurs. “Now you know what it’s like to deal with yourself.”

“I hope sober Summer can remind me that alcohol gives her an attitude.”

“Sober Summer could kick your ass.”

“I know. That’s why I like her,” he says. “Unfortunately, she’s going to have a nasty headache in the morning.”

She leans forward and plants a sloppy kiss on his cheek. “No, she’s not.”

“You definitely are,” he says. “And when we wake up tomorrow, I’ll have plenty of evidence to back that up.”

He carries her up the steps and into the inn lobby, where the desk attendant meets them with a mix of confusion and distaste, before starting up the stairs to their room. For her being as tipsy and tired as she is, he’s amazed at how tightly she’s holding on—though her arm _is_ starting to cut into his neck.

They reach their door, and after a second of fumbling with the key while Summer insists to keep peppering his cheek with kisses, he opens it. As they step inside, Summer’s forehead knocks against the threshold, and Qrow’s chest hardens with an icy dread he thought he’d forgotten how to feel. _Damn bad luck._

Summer mutters only a half-hearted “ouch” before he sets her on the bed and goes about fussing over her, pushing aside her bangs to run a thumb over the fresh red welt on her forehead. 

“That’s going to leave a bruise,” he mumbles. “I can see if there’s any ice down at the bar.”

“No,” Summer says, reaching up a hand to tug on his cape. “I want to sleep.”

“You _need_ to sleep,” he tells her, then leans down to touch his lips to her head. “I’m sorry.”

Her tipsy babbling drops into something somber. “It’s not your fault. It happens.”

“I’m going to go freshen up.”

He meets his half-shaded reflection in the bathroom and refuses to look at it. Head held down, he runs the water, watches it swirl around the bottom of the sink before spilling into the drain. It’s been a year. A year since the last dangerous flare up of his semblance, when Tai ended up with an infection from an Ursa bite, but even that could’ve been natural. Past that, Qrow doesn’t remember. He drops his hands into the water and lets the cold sting his palms. He’s a fool for being hopeful, for letting himself think Summer might have been right all this time about his semblance.

The water doesn’t feel as good on his face. He should shave, but he knows Summer likes the feeling of his stubble on her neck, so he leaves the razor alone on the sink counter. How in the hell has Summer stuck around this long with him? He’s overthinking. Maybe he needs to do that. Maybe he’s a little drunk, too.

He finally looks into the mirror, and all he sees is the boy with the curse.

When he emerges from the bathroom, Summer has kicked off her shoes and taken the side of the bed closest to the window—just like she does at home in Vale, the bedcovers drawn up to her chin. On the other side of the bed, the blankets are turned down.

“Qrow, come to bed,” Summer says, as if she can sense his doubt from across the room, and because he can hardly say no to her, he strips to his boxers and crawls in beside her.

She shifts closer, turning onto her side and stretching an arm over his ribs. Her skin is cold—especially her fingertips. On instinct, he pulls her into his chest, which draws a noise of contentment from her, even though he’s not much warmer. He runs his hands over her back, a touch she’s been falling asleep to since their graduation night three years ago, and her lips stretch in a tired, dopey smile. 

“I love you, Birdbrain.”

“Is that all?”

She raises her head to kiss him. “Yep. I just love you.”

“I love you, too,” he says, and he knows it. He may not love himself, but he sure as hell loves Summer Rose.

“Can you believe Tai and Raven are married now?” Summer asks, nestling her bruised forehead into the crook of his neck. Her tone is light, but he doesn’t miss the wistfulness in it—whatever it might mean. “It feels like just yesterday we were all meeting each other at Beacon for the first time.”

“What is it they say about time? It gets faster as you get older?”

Summer shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “Do you think we’ll get married, Qrow?”

He goes rigid against her. In a perfect world, he’d say yes without hesitation. Really, in that world, he would’ve married her already, made sure they never slept another night outside each other’s embrace. But this is not that world. In this world, he is the moon and she is the sun that outshines him, and with the grim possibility that his semblance really is bad luck, the thought of their love lasting is not a promise but a rare pinpoint of light among the dark.

“You don’t have to answer that,” she says. “Just know that I’d say yes, if you ever asked.”

“Maybe I will ask, then,” he responds, forcing hope into his words. “Now that I know you won’t turn me down.”

Her eyes stay closed, but her brow furrows. “Why would I do that? I can’t think of anything better than forever with you.”

And with just a few words, she has him blushing like a teenager. Forever. Forever is a taboo, an impossibility. But as she does with everything else, Summer has the magic to make him believe.

“I want a little girl someday,” Summer says, rolling onto her back. She presses a hand to her stomach as if this phantom girl is already there, growing. “With your eyes,” she adds. “I don’t want her to be a weapon, Qrow. I want her to know it’s okay to be soft.”

Now _this_ jars him. As soon as the words leave her mouth, Qrow can see it: a toddler bounding on chubby legs, her black hair tied in pigtails, her red eyes not vicious or frightening but full of light and wonder for the world. It feels like a divination. Him and Summer. Him and Summer and a little girl, made of their own flesh and blood. All three of them, forever.

It’s a future he never knew he wanted, that his whole being now aches to have.

His hand falls across the bed, and Summer holds it to her chest, kissing every cut and scar that mars his fingers.

“Let’s fight for that,” he says.

She tucks his hand against her chest. “A little girl?”

“And a future for her.”

Summer turns back into him, and he takes the gentle weight of her onto his hips and kisses her like they’ve already made it, like after years of fighting, they’ve finally earned the right to a life full of peace.

It’s a foolish dream to have. But if it will keep him going, he supposes it’s not really a bad one.

  1. _ouroboros, snapping blindly at his own tail_



The Dreadlands of Vacuo, a vast desert of sharp rocks and deathly heat, are hard enough to face as a team—but Qrow is far worse off alone. Just under an hour ago, a vicious sandstorm whipped across his path, spewing grit into his eyes and separating him from his partner. He’s yet to find her since.

He looks forward, backward, to every side, seeking out the hopeful white of her cape amidst the ruddy swirl of dirt. “Summer? Summer, where are you?” he calls, but he figures the wind must be pulling his voice in all the wrong directions, if they haven’t crossed paths by now.

If only he could call her. His scroll sits useless in his pocket, with the nearest comms towers hundreds of miles in the distance. Oz is a bitch for sending them out this far without backup, but with Raven in Solitas doing recon and Tai on guard at a village in Northern Anima, there was apparently no other choice.

Qrow rubs the remaining grit from his eyes and takes a glance at his scroll. Oz assigned their mission, but their dispatch came from a young Commander in the Atlesian military named James Ironwood—just by the way he writes his orders, Qrow has already decided he doesn’t like him. According to Ironwood, his special operations force recently uncovered a promising lead on the location of the summer maiden; supposedly, a tribe of desert bandits has been hiding her, but nothing looks like a bandit tribe out here. He of all people would know.

He keeps on walking. In a landscape this dangerous, it’s probably better for them to travel apart.

Eventually, the dirt begins to settle, and he can see the sky again, a deep, unfaltering blue. Once again, he repeats the same song and dance of sweeping the area, calling Summer’s name. His echo is the only answer.

The sun burns onto his neck, drawing a layer of sweat to his skin, and he tries not to think about how red it will look by the end of the day. He squints, training his eyes on the horizon. The space between the earth and sky seems to waver and blur, and among the ripples, he swears he sees a flicker of billowing white.

“Summer?” he tries again. 

“Qrow?”

Her voice rings out behind him, and relief crashes through him like a flood. He turns. The woman bounding towards him is no mirage on the horizon—she’s real, arms pumping, weapons shining at her hips.

“Summer! There you are!”

“Wait up, Birdbrain!”

She takes one stride. Two. Then Qrow’s eyes wrench wide as she lands on a bed of rocks and sand and falls right through it.

His heart drops. He sprints towards the hole and peers down, stopping himself just before he can tumble over the edge. A lone shaft of sunlight reaches Summer about twenty feet down, where she stands on an uneven bank of sand.

She cranes her neck to look up at him. “What are you waiting for?”

“I’m sorry!”

“Why are you sorry?” she exclaims. “I think we were supposed to end up here.”

She steps out of the way, and he jumps down into the sand. His mouth falls agape. They’ve fallen into some ancient vaulted tunnel, bounded in columns inscribed with a script he couldn’t begin to decipher. To the North—or at least he think it’s North—a collection of boulders barricades the tunnel, but to the South, the passage stretches into indefinite darkness.

Unfortunately, the latter seems their only way out.

Summer stares into the dark. “Do you have our flares?”

He rummages in his pack and grabs one, then places it in her hand. “Lead the way.”

As they proceed through the tunnel, they’re met with more of just the same—columns, sand, shadows. Somewhere, water trickles, a sign that the Dreadlands may not be as barren as they thought. And water usually means people. Which means for once, his bad luck may have actually helped them. The summer maiden could be hiding somewhere in these catacombs, tucked away from all the people and Grimm who want to her dead.

It’s a tiny thread of optimism, but Qrow lets it pull him like a lifeline through the dark.

Summer’s flare dies. He hands her another, and she pulls off the cap to ignite it. “You think there’s any way to figure out how long this tunnel stretches?”

“We could fire a shot. See if it hits something.”

“What if we hit some _one_?”

“Then we hope they’ll have a little sympathy for our situation and accept our apology.”

Sighing, Summer unhooks Cress from her belt and fires down the tunnel. Distance swallows the echo of the shot.

“Well, sounds like we’ve got a long way to go,” Qrow remarks.

Something clatters across the rocks behind them. They swivel in tandem, weapons at the ready. The path behind them is bare. Qrow starts to turn forward again, but Summer kicks him, urging him to stay put. Slowly, she traces her flare upwards, until it catches on a red-eyed form covered in milk white carapace.

The Scorpio Grimm clicks its jaw. Its tail, dripping with venom, curls down towards them. Summer shoots, but every hit ricochets off its armor and into the sand.

She drops the flare and throws up her hand, freezing the Scorpio in silver light.

“That will buy us some time,” she says. We need to run.”

She scoops up the flare, and the two of them burst into a sprint.

“How are we supposed to see now?” Qrow shouts.

“Doesn’t matter!” Summer calls. She’s ahead of him now, but he can barely see her through the pitch. “We just have to hope it can’t see us, either.”

The more they run, the faster it seems the Scorpio is moving behind them, its eight legs clicking in sickening chorus. Summer’s Lunar Year must be wearing off. He would try to fight them, but right now, there’s little chance they’d make it out—the space is too tight. In fact, it seems to be getting tighter, as if the tunnel ceiling is sloping down.

Light breaks through up ahead. Qrow gropes blindly at the dark with his free hand, making sure Summer is still within reach. She lets out a small shriek when his fingers snag in her cape.

“It’s just me, Sum,” he says.

She exhales loudly. “Thank the gods.”

Their gait slows as they emerge into the light. They’ve found themselves inside a temple, with a vaulted glass ceiling and stone statues of the gods of light and darkness standing guard. There was once an intricate mosaic on the floor, but most of the floor is gone, caved into a chasm with a hungry whirlpool undulating at the bottom. Qrow’s stomach wrings at the sight of it.

“We’ll go to the right,” Summer says. “The floor seems sturdier, there.”

Qrow glances over his shoulder. The Scorpio has caught up to them—and this time, it’s brought friends. More than he can count.

He extends Harbinger into its scythe form. “Shortstuff, turn around.”

“Oh _shit._ ”

She casts another Lunar Year, but its strength is spread thin, with so many of them to hold back. While they’re slowed, Qrow charges. Harbinger’s steel sluices their first stalker apart. Another lunges for him, and he shoots it into the tunnel wall. He hacks the poisonous tail off of one, but it just begins to reform.

Summer launches into the fight. She still fights so much like the girl he met at Beacon, with Cress and Lune swinging in controlled fury, but she hesitates less. Hits more. It took seven years, but she’s finally fighting with confidence.

When only a few of the Scorpios remain, Summer uses her semblance to slow them down again. She looks across the mouth of the tunnel to Qrow. “Want to try running again?”

“I’m good with that.”

She holsters Lune and grabs his hand, leading him around to the right. The mosaic crackles and depresses beneath their soles, and it reminds him of a video game he and Tai used to play, where they had to run across platforms before they disappeared. Only this time, the threat of death is very, very real.

More clicking echoes through the temple. The partners make the same mistake of looking back. A whole new colony of Scorpios is scuttling after them

“Qrow, be ready to catch me,” Summer says, and she tears back across the floor, head-first into danger. White light explodes throughout the temple, and the Scorpios turn to stone like the gods that watch them.

Except for one. Somehow, a single Scorpio has evaded the blast from Summer’s eyes. Summer fires on it. Misses. She spends less than a heartbeat in deliberation—her best bet is to run. The Scorpio follows right on her heels.

Qrow breaks for her, but it’s too late. The Scorpio’s tail crashes into Summer’s back, sending her flying over the chasm.

Tears scorch his eyes. Not Summer. He can’t lose her—not like this. Not so he might never recover her.

This is all his fault.

But then she lands on the other side of the temple, body crumpled and twitching. Broken. The Scorpio moves on Qrow, and with a swing powered by pure rage, he bats it into the chasm.

He doesn’t care to watch it drown. Scrubbing the tears from his eyes, he runs the precarious length of the intact floor to Summer’s quivering form on the other side. His whole body trembles as he draws her into his arms, inspecting every inch of her. She’s cut and bruised and one of her arms seems broken, but she should live. If she can engage her aura, she’ll live.

“Summer? Summer, talk to me,” he says, taking her face in his palms.

Her eyelids twitch a bit, but she doesn’t respond. “Come on, Quicksilver. You’ve got to stay with me.”

Nothing. He thrusts a hand against her chest and thanks the gods she still has a heartbeat. He has to get them out of here. He can wallow and worry later—right now, they need to get to where a rescuer can see them.

Gently as he can, he tucks her close and rolls to his feet. Quiet tears run down his cheeks as he walks, desperate to focus on the path but preoccupied with how limp and broken she feels in his arms. All this time she has persisted, written off every broken nail and sprained ankle and missed shot as mere coincidence, but he can’t let her do that anymore.

There is no choice—if he wants to save her, he has to leave her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you for reading!!! It'll probably be a while before the next update since I'm going back to school next week, but I hope to crank out the next three circs before the end of the month. xoxo Eli
> 
> P.S. you're welcome to follow my twitter @lumailia where I yell about loving Raven and tell the world about my procrastination methods du jour.


	4. circulations 10-12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is where the heartbreak hits. I've had a lot of fun stacking parallels/making references in this chapter, and if you catch some of em, let me know in the comments. Love y'all, and thank you for reading!

  1. _when wind spins the weather vane South_



The girl with the red eyes is falling.

He cannot catch her. He leaps for her, desperate to save her, cape whipping across his shoulders, but there is an invisible string with a mousetrap grip on his ankle keeping him out of her reach. She has his hands, long and slender, grasping. She has _her_ face, every delicate plane and contour wrought with fear. Starlight streaks past her red-cloaked shoulders, and a silent scream wrenches her lips apart. He calls out her name, but he cannot hear his own voice to know what he’s named her.

The earth opens up beneath the girl, creating a black hole with mountain teeth, and he knows he is going to lose her.

The stars blink out. Forever closes its eyes. And then there is only him, alone in the dark.

+

It’s nearing midnight when Qrow returns home from his solo mission. _Home._ The audacity of him to call it that. He and Summer have spent the past two years in this Vale apartment, but ever since they came back from Vacuo, he’s felt more like an unwelcome guest, a shadow on the wall, than Summer’s partner.

Summer didn’t do anything—the only thing she’s ever done to hurt him is love him. But he knew what his presence would do. Knew she’d heal faster without him around to stifle her aura. So he left. Oz offered him a mission, and while Summer was on the phone with his sister, he collected his weapon and slipped out of the house.

A foolish part of him hopes she’ll forgive him for leaving without notice, but he knows that’s not what he deserves.

When he comes into the kitchen, he spots a candle burning in a glass jar on the counter. There is a note beneath it, and he pinches it in his hands, holds it over the light to read the ink. _Welcome home, love._ His chest twinges. Summer had no way of knowing he’d been home tonight. Which means that every night, for the near week he’d been gone, she must’ve been leaving this letter out, lighting this candle. Hoping.

He leans forward and blows out the flame. 

Note in hand, he heads into the darkness of the back hallway, towards their open bedroom door. He enters, and there are more candles. Three on the nightstand beside Summer, tossing their light in shaky ripples across the walls. Summer doesn’t look at him, her eyes razor-focused on her book. He’s never understood how she can read in such low light, but that’s the last thing that should be on his mind when he can almost feel the frustration pouring off of her, hot and acrid as the little fires dancing at her side.

“I didn’t know you were taking a solo mission,” she says, so blankly it frightens him.

“You’re still healing. I thought you’d want some time alone.”

She shuts the book on her lap and looks up. Her gaze cuts like a silver knife. “Alone? I needed you here.”

“Summer, I can explain…”

“I already know,” she says. “You think it’s dangerous to be around me because you think it’s your fault I got injured.”

“I didn’t catch you.”

“You didn’t have to, yet,” she snaps. “Bad things just happen. I mean, we’re _Huntsmen_ , Qrow—our job is to run right into everything that hurts.”

His jaw feathers. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not making it worse.”

“You’re not understanding,” Summer says, rubbing her temples. “This isn’t about you. I’m tired. That’s why my aura is taking so long to heal me. Every time I use my eyes it takes the life out of me, but I keep doing it because it’s a part of doing my job—and I need you here because you can help me, and I can help you. I thought that’s what this all was about. Us saving each other.”

“I thought it was because you loved me,” he says, even though he shouldn’t. It’s his negativity speaking. Still, it’s the first thing that comes to mind when he sees her like this, so close but at the same time an infinity away.

Her stoic expression breaks. Firelight catches on the fresh rim of tears in her eyes. “I do love you,” she says, curling her hands in the blankets. “What have I done to make you think any differently?”

He looks at the floor. “I don’t know.”

She places the book beside her and rolls off the bed, takes a few shaky, defiant steps to where he stands. The short crop of her nightgown reveals the bruises that cover her legs, ringing crusty scabs and cranberry welts. It’s like she hasn’t healed at all.

“I’m sorry, Summer.”

“Stop apologizing,” she says. “We can’t go on like this.”

“No, we can’t,” he says, and he swivels for the open doorway.

Summer’s footsteps thunder after him. He kicks up his pace, but then her hand clamps around his arm, her grip surprisingly strong for her weakened state, and she turns him around. He expects to see anger on her face, but there is only the heavy pull of sadness, her cheeks ribboned with tears, and the guilt that spears him threatens to rip him apart.

“If you’re going to leave, just tell me,” she says. “I’d rather know.”

“I’m going to the couch,” he replies, coolly.

Summer lets out a huff. “If that’s what you want.”

It’s not. If this had been a normal solo mission, if he hadn’t been planning to leave her behind since the moment he picked her broken form out of the ruins in Vacuo, she would’ve been in his arms as soon as he came through the door. But that’s not sustainable, anymore. The longer he keeps her in his reach, the more likely it is that he’ll break her.

Forever is not a specter, or a wish. It has never existed at all.

Against all reason, he takes her cheeks in his hands and kisses her forehead. “Just for tonight,” he says. “And don’t forget to blow out your candles.”

“I won’t,” she says, and the small smile that rounds her lips makes him strong enough to pull away.

+

He gives her today as a parting gift.

In the morning, Summer is strong enough to come into the kitchen without much of a limp, but Qrow ushers her back to bed with their coffees and splays out beside her. She reads to him, burning another one of her flowery candles, and when her hands are free, he plays with them like he’s only just discovering her touch, kissing her knuckles and lacing their fingers together, in and out.

He doesn’t want to leave her with anything but the understanding that he loves her. That he’s doing this not in spite of that fact, but because of it.

After dinner, he sits across the living room from Summer—who has moved onto a different book, now—and thumbs through his scroll. Oz doesn’t have anything for him. He’ll just have to get away for a while, bring his cloud of bad luck somewhere else, before he can get back to work.

Summer’s new book proves less enthralling than the last, and she insists on going to bed early. Qrow comes out of the shower to find her browsing her scroll, probably ordering some new high-end dust cartridges for Cress or some other gadget to experiment with. The mundane comfort of it jars him. It’s so easy to imagine a future like this, with them each finding their little routines around each other, fitting their lives into a single path; he could see this same scene five, ten years from now, only maybe in a bigger house. Maybe with no war looming over their heads. Maybe with a little girl kneeling on the bed between them, working braids into her mother’s hair.

_You could stay,_ a phantom voice tempts him. _You could give her the life she dreams of._

But he can’t. He poses too great a risk to her, to their future child, if they were to have one like she wants. Like he wants, just as desperately. But more so, he wants her to live. Someone else can give her happiness, one day. Someone else can mend the fractures he’s going to leave.

And unlike him, they won’t be a curse.

Despite his efforts to hide it, Summer notices his unease as he falls onto his side of the bed. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. It’s just been a weird day.”

“We didn’t do anything.”

A smile tugs on his lip. “That’s what made it weird.”

She inches closer, placing her head on the crease between their pillows. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You know, you scared me last night. You seemed out of yourself,” she says. “I just don’t want you to feel like you have to bottle anything up—you can always talk to me. That much hasn’t changed since our Beacon days.”

He faces her, and the kindness in her eyes makes his chest seize. He doesn’t deserve her. That’s why he’s leaving. That’s why in the morning, she’ll wake up alone, and it’ll be for the better.

“Thank you, Summer,” he says. “For everything.”

She trails a finger over his cheek. “It’s because I love you. Always.”

“I love you, too,” he says, and though his heart is already breaking, he doesn’t resist as she shifts onto his pillow, tilts her head to give him one last gentle kiss.

She burns goodbye into his lips, and he knows he’ll never stop tasting the ashes.

  1. _ephemerality—so comes, so goes_



In the morning, Summer stretches her arms across the width of the bed before she even opens her eyes, expecting to feel Qrow’s warmth beside her, her hand falling across his back.

Instead, it drops right to the cold, downturned sheets.

Summer bolts up. Blinks the sleep out of her eyes. The door is closed, so she crosses to open it, hoping to hear Qrow puttering around in the kitchen, but there is only silence. _He could just be reading. Or maybe at the store? Just, hands off the panic button for now._

She tugs on her robe and paces to the living room. It’s empty. So is the kitchen, just to her left. Her eyes flicker to the racks by the front door, where her weapons rest alone, and dread congeals in a hard ball at the pit of her stomach.

There’s a note in the kitchen, tucked beneath her favorite strawberry candle. Her hands quiver as she pulls it from beneath the glass and unfurls it.

_My dearest Summer Rose,_

_Do you remember the night we graduated from Beacon, when we snuck up to the top of the tower and set our lanterns to the wind? Do you remember how I told you I wasn’t sure what I felt about wishes? Well, regardless, I’m sure now. I believe in the power of wishes. But I also believe we have to take the right steps to make them come true._

_Here is what I wish for, Summer: I wish for you to be happy. I wish for you to live out your days as a Huntress, to help win this war, to settle down with the family you’ve always wanted. I wish for you to live the dreams you deserve._

_The only problem is I can’t be a part of those dreams._

_I’m not going to argue why I’m leaving, because you know. It’s not because I don’t love you—I do. Meeting you was the best luck of my life. But you know good luck doesn’t last long when I’m around._

_Don’t try coming after me, Quicksilver. I know you’ll want to—and I can’t stop you if you do. But you’re not going to find me. I’m going somewhere far away from here, somewhere you don’t need to be._

_This is the last thing I ever wanted. But this is where we are. This is the sacrifice I have to make. We can win this war, just not together._

_Believe me, Summer, when I say I’d die a hundred times if it meant I was saving you._

_With all of my love,_

_Q_

By the time Summer reaches the end of the letter, she still hasn’t broken. Icy fear holds her together, numbing her, giving her just enough sickening adrenaline to read the words over and over. She knew. Peel away the new, hopeful Summer and the sad, cynical, anxious girl she used to be _knew_ this was coming. That nothing good could stay. That she would always be left to breathe the smoke of others’ fires.

At some point, the letter floats from her hands to the floor. Her vision blurs with tears. The ice that binds her melts, letting her break and fold into sobs. New bruises cover the old as her knees hit the tile, then her elbows. She sobs, mangled there on the floor, until the crooks of her arms are full of salt and her throat is burning and anger starts to caulk the fractures in her heart.

How could he do this? How could he give her a day of assurance, let her believe he was going to stay, only to leave her like this? It wasn’t like him. He would never cut her this deep.

But maybe she’s been the foolish one. Maybe he was right about his semblance, that he really is bad luck, and she just loves him too much to believe it. Nothing, though, feels like worse luck than this. 

+

“Where is he?”

Summer stalks across the glass floor of Oz’s office with enough force to make it shake, drowning out the humming of the clockwork beneath it. The Headmaster, infuriatingly poised, doesn’t move from his chair.

“This is a surprise, Miss Rose,” he says, calmly.

Summer stops herself just before she can punch her fist into his desk. “Where is Qrow?”

“He’s your partner. I’d assume that’s your business.”

Her eyes turn to slits. “You’re lying to me.”

Oz sighs, looking into his cup. “I should’ve known the most honest souls among us would be the best at detecting untruths,” he says. “I’ve trained you well.”

“What the hell does that mean?” she cries. “And where is Qrow?”

“On a mission, doing his duty. I’d be happy to give you an assignment as well, if you’re finding yourself in need of a distraction.”

“I don’t need a distraction. I need my partner.”

Oz stands and gathers his cane. He walks around his desk, towards Summer, and on instinct, she backs away.

“This is all you,” she says, with all the venom she can muster. “ _You_ convinced him that his semblance was real, that accepting it would make him a better fighter. But you’re wrong. All you’re doing is breaking our team apart.”

He simply nods as she speaks, unshaken by her fury. “That was not my intention, Miss Rose,” he says. “Mr. Branwen would prefer to work alone from now on, and after all he’s done for us, I believe I have a duty to honor his request.”

“What about what _I’ve_ done for us? Does that not matter?” Summer exclaims

“Your former partner and I don’t always see eye-to-eye, but we do agree upon the importance of keeping you safe,” he responds, and she flinches at the word _former_. _It really is over, isn’t it?_

“As I always do, I’ll give you a choice,” he continues, “you can take a mission, or you can leave.”

He turns the cane, a gesture meant to banish her, but Summer just clamps onto the handle and tenses her fingers.

“Your grip has gotten stronger,” he remarks.

“I’m angry.”

A smirk breaks his placid mask, and Summer wants to slap it off of him. “You wanted to be a Huntress, Summer,” he says. “And here you are. The best of them.”

“You know I wanted more than just that.”

Oz draws the cane away. “Love is a fragile game, Miss Rose. I suggest you find a way to move on quickly, if you want to keep up your skills as a Huntress. Or, at the very least, try to fight through the pain.”

It’s the last sentence that makes her tiny mends come unraveled. Her face scrunches and wrinkles, tears pouring over her cheeks. She balls her hands into fists, tight enough to pinch her nails into her palms. Tremors wrack her shoulders, her knees, as if her anger is a being—a bird beating at its cage, desperate to break free. All Oz does is look at her. No pity. No sorrow. Just looks, with those wise, dark, indifferent eyes that have seen a hundred heroes like her rise and fall.

For a moment, the clocks beneath her feet seem to stop. Silver light quivers in the corners of her eyes. And then she turns on her heels and runs, setting free her tears and choking down disaster.

+

Raven’s fingers are soothing, carding through Summer’s hair. “I’m preening you for battle,” Raven says. “If that’s what you want.” But Summer doesn’t want a fight anymore. Her anger has made her sick; she spent a good hour on the couch hungover from the flood of it before she called Raven and she and Tai portaled to see her. They made her lunch, but she’s hardly touched it, content to stare into her water glass as she and Raven sit on the couch. Tai stands across the room watching them, filling the space where Harbinger used to lean against the wall.

This isn’t how you’re supposed to deal with a breakup. She’s acting like he died. Though never seeing him again feels just about the same. It’s all just new, she tells herself. She had never been in love before Qrow—her body is treating him leaving her like another kind of grief. 

Raven pulls a bit too hard on one strand, and Summer yelps.

“Sorry,” she says. “You know, the offer to kill him is still on the table.”

“Please don’t kill your brother, Raven.”

“I would for you.”

Summer tries so hard to laugh. “I appreciate the sentiment.”

“He’s such an ass,” Tai grumbles. He peels himself from the wall and starts to pace the room. “Thinking he can just up and leave like this—what good’s it going to do him in the end? What was this all for?”

“For me, apparently,” Summer says. “But I didn’t want it.”

“Maybe he’ll regret it, just like he regrets our past in the tribe,” Raven offers. “And then he’ll come home. Realize he’s being stupid.”

“You don’t believe it, do you?”

Tai stops his pacing. Raven’s fingers fall out of her hair. “Believe what?” Tai asks.

“That his semblance is bad luck, that being with him would’ve killed me.”

Silence grips the room. Tai and Raven glance at one another, then back at Summer.

“I just…I don’t think either of us is sure,” Tai says, crossing his arms. “Maybe you should get out of the house for a while. Stay with us on Patch for a few days. Longer, if you need to.”

Summer’s gaze trails to the empty back hallway. “I guess I could,” she says. “My grandmother is getting so old now, anyway—I should probably pay her a visit.”

Raven slides a hand over her own. “Come home with us,” Raven says. “And if my brother wises up and comes back here, I’m sure he’ll know where to find you.”

+

A few days on Patch becomes a few weeks, which then stretches into months. Summer lives with her grandmother, until the day that she has to bury her, and then their tiny house becomes her own. She fills it with flowers. She takes missions when she can, when being home gets to be too much, and she needs to feel the wild again.

Qrow never comes back for her. She doesn’t expect him to. Still, some mornings, she rolls over and hopes she’ll find his sleeping form beside her, that losing him has all been some long, terrible dream.

One day, she decides to plant rosebushes in the beds beneath the porch. A testament to her family name, she reasons. To herself. And as she crouches there under the beating sun, working roots into the soil, someone steps up to meet her.

Her visitor is a stranger. At least she thinks, until she looks closer. The woman is older, now, her face stitched with wrinkles, but Summer should know her hazel eyes anywhere.

“You’ve come a long way from the girl in the cellar, haven’t you?”

Summer shucks off her gardening gloves and embraces her. “Ambrose,” she says, and Ambrose Glen, her savior all those years ago, places a hand on her hair. “It’s so good to see you.”

Ambrose draws away, but takes hold of her hands. “I’ve heard quite a lot about you from your old Headmaster,” she says. “I had no doubt you’d become a wonderful Huntress someday.”

“Thank you, Ambrose.”

“I’m surprised you’re even here,” she says. “Last few times I came around, you were on a mission.”

“Well, I do need to rest sometimes. It’s been a bit of a heavy month.” 

“Then it’s good that you’re taking care of yourself,” Ambrose says, dropping Summer’s hands. “I know you’ve got a world to save, but I did hear a teaching position just opened up at Signal, if you were interested in a day job. You’d be a great fit.”

Summer tucks her head to hide a bashful smile. “That’s…sweet of you. But I still have a lot of adjusting to do.”

“I can understand that,” Ambrose says. “You look strong. But you also look like heartbreak.”

Pain pricks in her chest. “You have no idea.”

“Come by for dinner sometime, alright? My wife and I have a few kids now—I’m sure they’d love to meet you.”

Summer nods. “I’d like that.”

Ambrose heads down the driveway, and Summer watches her until she disappears into the arms of the trees.

+

Qrow tries so hard not to think about Summer.

He drinks more. Sleeps less. Oz throws him into Remnant’s darkest corners, and he fills them with dust and gunpowder. People call him _hero, reaper, savior_ —a few months make him a new man. Still, somehow, she creeps in, haunting the space between sleep and daydreams, dancing at the center of his nightmares. She is the single complication in an otherwise simple life.

So he hooks himself on simplicity. Wind, burning in his lungs. Steel, sieving Grimm to dust. Blood, pouring from his wounds, making him clean. The battle is his redemption. He was born to be a weapon, and weapon he becomes.

Misfortune has a name. He will not make it her burden.

  1. _the turning of the soil for the seed_



Qrow follows his sister by the movement of her shadow, which falls long against the trees under the autumn sun. She doesn’t see him—trailing her, he’s just another bird in the trees. For now, he hopes to keep it that way.

As far as he knows, she wasn’t assigned to a mission in Mistral. That was his jurisdiction for the week, clearing Grimm out of a small merchant city. A solo job. According to the mission boards, Raven should be at home on Patch with Tai and Summer, far away from him.

But she’s here, alone, and her unofficial presence in their old homeland gives him far more fear than comfort.

Raven stops in the middle of a clearing and draws her sword. “I know you’re here,” she says. Her voice reverberates in the trees, sending the surrounding birds—save her brother—scattering.

A tall, girl-shaped shadow leaks out of a gap between the trees, and Qrow feels shock drill through him. The shadow pokes around Raven, inspecting her before returning to her owner’s side.

Leader Carian steps into the clearing and removes her mask. Her face, though stern as ever, is carved with deep wrinkles, and her thinning brows have been thickened by black lines of kohl. Sallow blue pools beneath her crimson eyes, which have lost but all of their lashes. It gives her the look of a cadaver, animated by the wind. 

“I thought you might not come,” Carian says, harshly, making clear age hasn’t blunted her viciousness.

“I’m not afraid of you.”

Carian pulls a bit of her shadow into her hands, making the handle of a weapon. “I know. Because you never came back to face the consequences of your actions,” she says. She siphons the rest of the shadow into a blade and lays it across her opposite palm. “I’d say enough time has passed for us to bury the hatchet.”

Raven bristles. “Consequences? The tribe abandoned us.”

“We didn’t want to,” Carian says, and her eyes fix on the floral wrap that covers Raven’s stomach. “But it seems you didn’t mind.”

“You don’t know what I felt. Or what I feel now.”

“Is this mission worth it, Raven?” Carian prods. “You sever the Hydra’s head, and three more grow back. How many cuts will it take until you realize you’ll never find its heart?”

“I have…my doubts,” Raven concedes. “The more I fight, the more I’m not sure everything is what it seems.”

Carian coughs, and her whole body shudders beneath her robes. “It’s about time you started learning to ask questions. You were always such a follower.”

“I wanted to learn from you.”

“Let me ask you something,” Carian starts. “Do you know what my name comes from.”

Raven nods. “It’s a bird.”

“Wrong,” Carian says, turning her blade into the ground. “It comes from what the birds of our family sigil used to _eat_. Carrion. Dead, rotting flesh. My mother named me Carian to remind me that there would always be someone better than me, that I would be weak—I would be _prey_ —until I could prove I wasn’t. When I became Tribe Leader, I could’ve changed my name if I wanted, made myself sound stronger. But I didn’t. Because I was undead. The little girl I used to be, the girl who thought she could never be as great a leader as her mother—she rotted away long ago. And look at what stands before you. Old rot on old bones, somehow still living. But not for much longer.”

“You’re sick,” Raven says, shoulders dropping with what has to be sorrow. Qrow can’t make himself feel the same. Carian dying will be severance—that string to the past, forever broken.

“I am,” Carian says. “In every sense of the word, I suppose.”

Raven rivets her gaze to the forest floor. “I don’t know what you want me to do. But I know I’m not going to bend to the people who broke me.”

“And what makes you think he put you back together?”

Her head shoots up. Qrow doesn’t know who she could be talking about. Tai? Oz? Himself? But Raven seems to know. Her face washes out, her pupils filling up her eyes.

“It won’t be long before I’m dead, Raven. That’s how long you’ll have to make your choice,” Carian says. “Or rather, determine whether or not you have a choice at all.”

Raven has no rebuttal. Only stands there, statue-rigid. Carian waits only a moment before returning her shadow to its place at her feet and receding into the forest. 

Qrow almost wants to take after his mother, confront her for himself. But something binds him to his sister, forcing him to watch as she falls to her knees and begins to weep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOO. TYSM for your support of this story so far!!! It'll probably close out in February, with the last few chapters released in pretty quick succession (hopefully) because I'm moving into work on my original novel, but I've loved putting this fic out more than you know. Still holding out for that STRQ YA book someday, though.


	5. circulations 13-15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not gonna lie kids it's been Writer Machine BROKE these past two weeks (also school...cries) so if substantial edits appear on this chapter sometime later this week, you'll know why. Anyway, welcome back to me breaking Team STRQ's hearts

  1. _strength, given new hands_



Summer is sitting at her kitchen table, parsing through mission files with a pot of peppermint tea, when someone knocks on her door. Her eyes go to the door, then the clock; it’s almost midnight, which Summer deems far too late for anyone of reason to be looking for her. But it could be Ambrose, or the new couple down the street. Or it could be Tai, coming to ask for an extra helping hand with his and Raven’s very fussy—if very adorable—days-old baby girl.

When Summer looks through the window, the last thing she expects to see is Raven herself, Yang bundled in purple blankets in her arms.

She opens the door, and a cold spring wind rushes in, rustling the edges of her cloak. “Raven? Is everything okay?”

“Can we come inside?”

Summer tries to search her face, but she’s standing too far back in the shadows. “What’s going on? Where’s Tai?”

“Home. Asleep. Can we please just come in?”

“Of course.”

Summer leads Raven through the darkened foyer into the kitchen. She motions for Raven to take a seat with Yang at the table, then rummages in the cupboards for an extra mug. Raven doesn’t object when Summer sets the tea in front of her, but she doesn’t touch it, either.

“Is she asleep?” Summer asks. She hovers by Raven’s shoulder, peers down at Yang. Her eyes are closed, her little nose twitching with each breath.

“Unless she’s faking it, she is,” Raven answers.

Summer responds with a restrained laugh and returns to her seat. “Well, she is Tai’s kid, too. I wouldn’t put it past her.”

That only makes Raven tense. She grabs her mug with her free hand and pulls it forward, letting white ribbons of steam obscure her face—but they cannot hide the worried depressions in her forehead, the way her vibrant eyes appear strangely dulled. 

“Did you and Tai get in a fight?” Summer asks, eyes bending in suspicion.

Raven shakes her head. “No. He’s fine.”

“That’s not what I asked.” 

“He’s gone to bed,” she replies, tersely. “He was up with Yang all last night.”

“Good for him,” Summer remarks. When Raven doesn’t lighten at all, she reaches a hand across the table and holds it over Raven’s, right where it sits by her mug. “Talk to me, Raven. What’s going on?” 

Raven hesitates, as if her answer is lodged in her throat. “Can you hold her for me?” 

“Sure,” Summer says, stretching her arms, and Raven hands her baby across the table. Yang stirs a little, but doesn’t wake, and Summer leaves a kiss on the crown of her head. “Hi, sweet girl. Oh, you are so beautiful—just like your mama.”

“You’re good with her,” Raven remarks.

“Well, yeah,” Summer says, giving Yang another kiss on her hair. “My two favorite people made her.”

Raven folds her hands atop her lap and stares at them. “I need to tell you about my last mission.”

“Okay,” Summer says, a skeptical lilt to her voice. She adjusts Yang in her lap and poses to listen.

“Before I got my assignment, I portaled to Anima. I was following Qrow,” Raven starts, and Summer sucks in a tiny breath at the mention of his name, the memory of his touch that follows. “Oz had him doing busy work, and I just needed some room to breathe. I’d been having some…trouble on missions. And I’d just done the test; I wasn’t sure how to tell Tai about my pregnancy, yet. So, I followed Qrow, and I saw our mother.”

“Gods, you haven’t seen her since—”

“—since before my brother and I left for Beacon,” she finishes for her. “She was dying, when I saw her. A week ago, I found out she was finally dead.”

“You hated her.”

Raven bunches her hands in her skirt. “I did.”

“Is that why you’ve been like this?” Summer prods. “Tai and I thought it was maybe just the hormones, that that was why you seemed so down all the time...”

“You’re always so quick to explain away everything.”

Summer flinches. “Raven, I’m just trying to help.”

“I know,” Raven says, deflating. “I don’t know what to believe, anymore. But I know I can’t do this. I can’t be here and still survive.”

“It’s been a long time since I heard you talk like that,” Summer responds. A thin layer of ice edges her words—she knows what’s coming. This sudden gnawing in her gut has never been wrong.

“Well, I’ve had some revelations,” Raven says.

_And there it is._ “So you want to leave. Just like your brother did.”

Color blazes back into Raven’s eyes—anger, red as burning coals. “I am nothing like my brother.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Raven’s jaw twitches, but the rest of her face seems to cool. “Don’t do this to me, Summer.”

Summer thumbs a few of Yang’s golden curls. “I want you to be happy, Raven. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, for you and for Qrow,” she says, even though his name still feels thick in her mouth. “But is this really going to make you happy? Tai loves you, I love you—if you stay, we can help you through this.”

“You can’t!” she cries, leaping out of her chair. “You can’t help me. Oz coddles you, he always has. You don’t do the kind of missions I do. You don’t know what I’ve seen.”

“Because you won’t tell me.”

“Because I _can’t._ ”

Summer, feeling the stitches in her heart begin to fray, holds Yang closer. “I thought you were stronger than this.”

This disarms her. Her heaving shoulders still and her face droops—she _wilts_. “I…” she starts, “…I’m scared.”

Summer isn’t sure what to do, at first. She hasn’t seen Raven like this since they were teenagers, that day in Oz’s office where she told her she knew the truth about their mission. That they’d come to Beacon not to learn how to be Huntsmen, but how to kill them.

She can’t imagine her going back to that, a life of scavenging villages, killing innocents, running Huntsmen into the ground. But maybe she was too wrapped up in her own loneliness to notice Raven was slipping away.

Yang feels suddenly heavy in her arms, yet the coil of guilt and fear in her stomach is somehow heavier.

More than anything, she wishes she could save her, reel her back from this edge she’s run to. But Raven’s face is etched with the firm, tense lines of decision, and Summer knows there’s nothing she can do to stop a Branwen who’s made up their mind. 

She rises, slowly. Raven hangs her head, and she doesn’t meet Summer’s gaze until she’s holding Yang between them; a sleepy baby girl, made a peace offering. It is too great a burden for someone so young and small to bear.

“I can’t do this,” Raven says, though she brings her arms up to hold her daughter, as if some tiny part of her still believes she might. “I can’t be a mother.”

As much as it breaks her to hear the words, Summer is thankful Raven has told her this last little truth—it feels as though the whole room has let out a breath it was holding.

“That’s okay,” Summer whispers. “I can.”

Raven leans forward and kisses Summer’s forehead, and Summer lets herself lean into her, this broken woman who’s been her friend, her confidant, her sword and shield across countless battlefields. It hurts, being entrusted to raise her child, but she understands. Raven really _can’t_ do this; a fledgling has no business raising a flock.

Summer fits Yang back in Raven’s arms and tears her gaze away, afraid to see the way she looks at her. “When are you going?”

“Soon.”

Summer can only make herself nod. Cross her arms.

“Take care of Tai for me, too,” Raven says.

“I will.”

Raven frees a hand to clasp her shoulder. “Thank you, Summer,” she says. “You know you’re my favorite, right?”

All Summer can do is sigh. “I love you, too.”

Raven leaves without another word. Summer watches her from the window, waiting until she reaches the end of the drive—giving her the chance to turn back—before she locks the door and returns to the kitchen. She should get back to work, bury Raven’s plan under mission logs and Grimm counts, but all she can make herself do is grab Raven’s mug and pour the contents down the sink. Tiny remnants of tea leaf speckle the bottom, and Summer doesn’t care to wash them down. 

She can do this. She can be a mother to Yang, and whatever that might make her to Tai. But gods be damned if she won’t pray every night that Raven changes her mind. 

+

Qrow traces a finger through the concentric water rings on the bar counter, distorting the prints of the bottom of his whiskey glass into interlocking sunbursts. He doesn’t have much else to do; he’s the only one here this late, and the bartender, an old man from Argus with a slow-droning voice, doesn’t make for much company.

The bar doors chime behind him, but he doesn’t turn around—the patterns of water on the table are far too interesting to his still-slightly-drunken mind.

Then loud heels click across the wooden floor, followed by a familiar swish of feathers stirring the air.

“Mantle, huh? Oz really is running you ragged.”

Qrow swivels in his stool. Raven stands with her hands on her hips, her shoulders thrown back in defiant poise. The bar’s dim light casts most of her face in shadow, but he can see her smile isn’t quite complete, twitching with whatever emotion she’s trying so hard to pack away.

“What are you doing here?” he grumbles.

“You know why I’m here,” she says. “And not there.”

Qrow blinks his eyes wide as the realization slams him. “You ran away.”

“It’s not running away when you have somewhere to go,” Raven replies. 

“But you have a kid, now,” he says, rubbing his forehead. “That’s not usually something you can just walk away from.”

Raven sets her gaze on the racks of bottles behind him. “It’s better if she never knows me.”

“You’re being selfish, Raven.”

“Sometimes we have to be,” she says. There’s a beat of silence, burned with tension. “Our mother is dead.”

“Good,” says Qrow. He lifts his drink from the counter and takes a long sip. He’d hoped Carian would die sooner, but months of her suffering feels like justice enough.

“Which means someone has to lead the tribe.”

Qrow lowers his glass. “Raven, are you out of your mind?”

“I don’t have a choice,” says Raven. She moves her hands to the hilt of her sword, like she plans to draw it, but the motion is only to keep herself steady. “But you do.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m giving you one,” she says, beginning to pace. “You can take my offer, come back to my tribe, give a little back to the people who _raised_ us. Or, you can keep fighting a war you’re destined to lose.”

He stands, takes one wobbly step towards his sister. “What makes you think we’re going to lose?”

“The fight never ends,” Raven says, voice rising. “We can’t defeat Salem. Nobody can. You think Oz has made you into a weapon? He’s made you a _sacrifice._ ”

Qrow pulls Harbinger from its clasp at the small of his back. “He gave me a place in this world. I take these missions, and I’m not a curse anymore. I’m a hero.”

Raven shakes her head, slowly. “You’re not a hero, Qrow,” she says. “None of us are.”

Rage burns a current through him. He turns the switch at Harbinger’s gears, expanding it into sword form, and makes a careless swing at his sister. Red steel grinds against silver.

“Is this what you want?” Raven asks. The reflection of her blade in her eyes sets them on crimson fire.

“You crossed a line.”

Their swords unlatch. Raven swings this time. He jumps back onto the bar, stepping in his condensation sunbursts. The bartender shouts for them to stop, but they drown him out with the clash of their weapons.

Raven rears back for a harder hit, and Qrow flips Harbinger in half. Fires. She blocks the worst of the hit with her arm guard, but the momentum sends her flying back into the wall. Red aura cracks and ripples over her body.

Qrow walks to the edge of the bar and stares down at her. “Stop this. We’re supposed to be fighting together.”

“Then come home,” Raven answers, peeling herself from the floor. “Stop being a coward.” 

He groans—there’s no arguing with her. She leaps back onto the bar and slams her blade into his. He doesn’t want to fight her, but she’s given him no choice. As she drives him back across the counter, he aims for her arms, her legs, anything that will simply shake her. Killing his sister, especially in this piss-poor bar in Mantle, is something he’d never forgive himself for.

“Think about what you’re doing, Rae,” he says. She just hits him again. “Would Tai be proud of you? Would _Summer_?”

“You left them, too!”

She brings her sword hard against Harbinger’s gearwork. The force throws him off the bar, into a table. He jumps onto a chair, and he’s surprised the table doesn’t crack under the weight of him. In his moment of weakness, Raven lunges, but before she can land a hit, he switches to Harbinger’s scythe conversion and blocks her. She makes another attempt from the table. It misses, and he sends Harbinger’s blunt end into her ribs, tossing her to the floor at the far end of the bar. Her sword sticks in the floor a good three feet away. 

“Do you want to be remembered as a traitor, Raven?” Qrow calls to her down the aisle.

She crawls to her knees, lifts her face. Her features are twisted in fury, but he swears the lamplight catches on streams of tears on her cheeks.

“I’m not a traitor,” she says. She makes a few more steps, grabs her sword by the handle. “I’m a survivor.”

Then she frees the blade and disappears in a maelstrom of black feathers.

Qrow simply stands there in the wake of their fight, somehow both stunned and wildly unsurprised at once. “Dammit,” he mutters. “You’re an idiot, Raven.”

He bursts through the bar doors, out into the small mining village where he’s been stationed. Springs in Solitas aren’t much warmer than its winters, but Qrow welcomes the cold; the bite against his skin is invigorating when the rest of him feels so raw.

For a brave second, he thinks about flying home. Tai will need help with the baby—maybe more than just Summer can offer. He doesn’t know if he could stand to face her again, the woman who lives in his dreams, but for her, for Tai, for his sister’s child, maybe he could scrounge up the courage. 

He curls his right hand into a fist and counts the rings. Ponders. He can’t go back. With Raven’s departure, Summer and Tai have been cursed enough.

  1. _a new leaf from a broken stalk_



Summer’s favorite spot on Patch Island rests almost at its perfect center, at the grassy top of an otherwise rocky promontory. From its crest, she can see the full eastern stretch of the island, how the forested hills roll off into the coastline, receding deeper into the haze of distance. She visits this spot whenever she needs to clear her head, but mostly at dawn, when the sun rises to color the world and the day feels pure and new.

This morning, the clouds are red, smeared against an orange sky like crushed rose petals. According to an old sailor’s rhyme, a red sky warns of a coming storm—and with the headwinds whipping her hair across her face, Summer can believe it. Still, she won’t let the promise of a later trouble rupture her peace.

She closes her eyes and slips into a state of meditation. The quicker she can shed her anxieties for a moment, the quicker she gets in touch with her magic. Sometimes, she feels all the power in her eyes, sitting behind them like warm weights. Others, it’s in her chest, spreading finger-lengths over her heart and ribs. But today, she can feel it everywhere, tiny threads of warmth branching through her veins.

_I am lucky,_ she tells herself. _I have a power that can change the world. I am grateful. I have the strength to use it. I am lucky, I am lucky, I am lucky._

A vibration in her leg pulls her out of her trance. She sees a message from Tai on the screen, and worry quickly overshadows her bliss.

**Can you come over? It’s important.**

Her stomach drops. Raven is gone. This can’t mean anything else.

She was a fool to hope she’d be any different from her brother.

With tremors in her hands, Summer manages to type back a message. **I’ll be there.**

And then she runs. She’s winded by the time she reaches Tai’s front porch, but she’s shaved half off how long it normally takes to walk. She doesn’t even have to knock on the door. Her heavy, tired steps set off a thunder of creaks in the floorboards, announcing her arrival, and Tai opens the door.

His eyes and face are red, his hair disheveled either from sleep or clutching it in disbelief. “She left us,” he says in painful exhale, and then he stumbles into Summer’s arms.

_I know,_ Summer’s thoughts echo. But she’s not going to tell him that. Instead, she throws her arms around his neck and holds him tight, trying so hard to be a pillar for him when she knows at any second, they could both break apart.

They stand there a while, in full view of anyone who might walk by, cradling each other. Tai sobs into her shoulder, hands bunched in her cloak while she traces circles into his vest. She’s always known him to be so steady, so solid. These tremors don’t belong in his body.

Eventually, he calms enough to lead her inside. She offers to make him tea, but he declines, wanting only to not be alone. Summer can understand that. A long time has passed, but she can still remember exactly how empty she felt after Qrow left her, how impossibly bare she felt without him. Still, she can only imagine how Tai feels. Raven was his _wife,_ the mother of his child—she promised him forever and then wrenched it away.

At least Qrow was kind enough to give her a warning.

Summer sits beside Tai on the couch and takes his hand. He pushes his back into a cushion, clearly hoping to steel himself, but the heartache continues to wrack his shoulders.

“Where’s Yang?” Summer asks.

Tai sniffles again, wipes his face with his arm. “Asleep.”

“That’s good.” 

“Why would she do this?” Tai asks, turning his face to the ceiling, and Summer isn’t sure if he’s asking her or the world. “We were…happy. I thought we were happy.”

“I don’t know,” Summer says, and the image of Raven in her kitchen, Yang in her arms and the passion sapped from her eyes, sears the back of her mind. She wants to assure Tai that Raven loves him, that her reasons for leaving are hardly different from Qrow’s, but she really can’t be sure. It feels foolish to believe in love in the wake of heartbreak.

“She left a note. Just like Qrow left you,” Tai says. He fishes a wad of paper out of his pocket and unfolds it. “One line.”

“That’s Raven for you,” Summer mumbles as she takes the letter from Tai’s hand. There, in Raven’s signature scrawl, is the sentence: _Take care of them._

Summer sighs, a heavy flood of sadness weighing down her shoulders. “I’m so sorry, Tai,” she says. “I wish they both could’ve stayed.”

She sets the letter in her lap and embraces him again. Only this time, they both cry. All Summer ever wanted was for the four of them to stick together. They were the greatest team—the greatest _family_ —to ever graduate Beacon, now torn asunder, all because of two startled birds who were always meant to fly away.

It’s a while before they quiet, clinging to each other until their breaths slow and their tears dry on their cheeks. As Summer pulls away, though, the newly-settled silence is cut by a resounding cry from Tai’s bedroom.

“I’ll get her,” Summer says. She lifts herself from the couch and travels almost in a haze to the back of the house, where Yang lies in a bassinet at the foot of the bed. She kicks and wails, tiny fingers folding around the air.

Summer reaches into the bassinet and nestles Yang into her arms. “Hi, sweet girl,” she whispers, punctuated with a kiss on her forehead. “Oh, don’t cry little sunflower. Aunt Summer’s got you.”

She rocks her, humming softly, until her crying ebbs into silence and her fingers find purchase on Summer’s collar. Then, she simply holds her, admiring. She loves this baby girl. She loves her father, and her mother. And while Raven may be gone, Summer resolves to never break her promise to her. It is her duty to the world to keep loving, and as she looks into Yang’s pretty violet eyes—the perfect overlap of her parents’—she’s never been more certain that it’s an easy duty to keep.

Summer directs a glance towards the threshold, where Tai has been standing—for how long, she isn’t sure. He watches them, a mix of sorrow and fondness on his face, until finally, he smiles, and for a brief, fleeting moment, everything feels like sunrise.

+

Summer takes quickly to motherhood.

She expected resistance from Yang. The baby girl knew Raven’s arms, Raven’s chest, Raven’s smooth, raspy voice, but she leans into Summer just the same, as if nothing has changed at all.

Raven won’t come back. For the first few months with Tai and Yang, Summer keeps the windows open in the mornings, hoping maybe she’ll fly back in and decide to stay. But she never does. Nor does her brother, though Summer can’t say that surprises her. She cannot fill the holes the twins left, she realizes, but she tries her best to patch them anyway, to make a family of three from what should’ve been five.

The days pass, and Yang grows. Her hair gets longer, and Summer ties it in a tiny sprout on top of her head. She says her first word— _Da-da—_ to Tai from Summer’s arms. During a fit, her eyes flash red, and Summer sees a vision of a girl that could’ve been hers, a tiny thing with eyes just like her father’s.

But that dream has shattered. She has a new life now, a new purpose. And she wouldn’t trade anything for the feisty baby girl who has just started calling her _Mama._

+

Tai, Summer realizes, has a strange way of picking up the pieces.

There are the nights he sulks. The nights he cries. The nights they both cry, wondering why their precious birds have flown away, and Summer falls asleep on his shoulder until Yang wakes the both of them. Then, there is a happy night. Another. Yang sleeps in Summer’s arms while Tai tells her stories about his family—she likes the one about his father, who went to university in Atlas for physics, but in his third week, accidentally set a lab on fire and was sent home to Patch. Tai laughs the whole time he tells it, and Summer notices the dimple on his left cheek finally pinches as deep as the one on the right. 

Eventually, they can talk about the twins without tears. While they clean the kitchen after dinner, Tai reminisces on tricking Qrow into taking his cleanup duties. They plant new flowers in the outside beds, and Summer recounts the first time she got Raven in pink nail polish. On a stroll with Yang, they find a wind-tossed straggler—a graduation lantern, all the way from Beacon—stuck in a tree, and they joke about the years their team snuck into the gala, how they would con fourth-years into taking them as dates, then all run off to dance together.

“It’s funny, you know?” Tai says one night, speaking to Summer while bouncing Yang on his knees. “We still ended up as partners. Doing this, taking care of her. It just took what, nine years, to enact our master plan?”

“ _Our_ master plan? If you’ll remember, I was the one who drew up the contract.”

“Yeah. You wrote an actual contract and made me sign it. That was weird.”

Summer laughs, shaking her head. “You always thought I was weird.”

“I thought you were incredible.”

The breath leaves her lungs. She stammers a moment, unsure of how to answer. This isn’t how Tai talks to her. Tai is _Tai._ He pokes fun at her cloak and sticks French fries up his nose to make Yang laugh. Tai doesn’t leave her scrambling to find her words.

“I still do,” he adds, drawing Yang back into his arms. “I don’t know what me and this little bean would do without you.”

“Bean!” Yang exclaims, and to Summer’s relief, it scatters the tension.

Summer claps. “Yang! That’s another word!” she coos, giving her a tap on the nose. “You are growing up too fast. Stop that.”

“Can’t stop it,” Tai jokes. “Next week, we’ll be seeing her off to Beacon.”

Summer tenses. She wants Yang to be whatever she wants to be, to follow whatever dream she might choose, but the thought of this sweet baby girl becoming a Huntress terrifies her.

Somehow, she lets her thoughts past her lips. “Maybe she won’t go to Beacon.”

Tai shrugs. “Yeah. Maybe she won’t be as reckless as us.”

But Tai was never so reckless. Summer remembers their days at Signal, when Summer would stick pencils in her bun, and Tai would make sure she took them out before they started sparring. When he and Auburn, their friend from down the road, would sit together on the way to field trips, and Tai would always give Auburn the aisle seat, knowing her fear of heights. Long nights on the training grounds, always ending in Tai’s parents taking a whole host of kids for tacos and ice cream. Those minutes before their entrance exams, sitting in plastic chairs outside the gym, inspecting each other’s weapons. Summer had grown so used to seeing Tai as the brawler he was on the battlefield, she never noticed how cautious he could be.

She wonders how Raven knows him, this man who gave her everything. She wonders if he will be different for her, if they can make new casts of each other from their worn-out molds.

Then she wonders if she could love him—and one day, she decides that she does.

Qrow was her trial by fire. They began as rivals, would-be enemies. He was danger, adrenaline, rough edges hiding a gunpowder kind of softness. They grew a love so desperate and kinetic it torqued into a tailspin, destined for crash. Where Qrow was passion, Tai is comfort. A summer sea, warm and steady, enveloping her. He has become a harsher echo of the boy he used to be, but he is still so full of kindness, an almost stubborn strain of compassion that grates against the cruelty of their world.

Summer lets him kiss her. She kisses him back. She holds onto him, pressing their hearts together, curling her fingers in his vest until white bone peers through her swollen knuckles. She does not forget, but she does not keep forcing herself to remember.

  1. _what goes up must come down, but it will never be the same_



“Wow. What brings _you_ back to Vale?”

Qrow glances up from the ice melting in his glass. He’d hoped that voice didn’t belong to who he thought, that it only just sounded like him, but to Qrow’s enduring misfortune, it really is Taiyang Xiao Long standing in front of him.

He grunts through his nose, and Tai, pigheaded as always, takes it as an invitation to pull out the chair in front of him and take a seat.

“The Crow Bar? Really?” Tai starts. “Come on, you know dad jokes are my thing.”

Qrow swirls his glass. “What do you want?”

“I was in the city taking my exams for my teaching license,” he answers. “I walked by, saw my old best friend at a window table drinking by himself—was I supposed to just ignore you?”

“Oz pinged you my location,” Qrow deadpans.

“Semantics!” Tai exclaims. “Quit being such a hard-ass, okay? You know why I’m here.”

Qrow drinks his whiskey down to the bottom of the glass. “Right,” he says. “You want my congratulations.”

Tai pinches his nose and lets out a heavy sigh. “No,” he says. “She hasn’t even had her yet.”

_Her_ feels like a punch to the gut—he regrets already downing the rest of that drink. He gave up on a future with Summer years ago, but he can never forget the nights they talked about it, how she wished for a little girl with his eyes and her hair and enough goodness to eclipse the both of them.

“Summer always wanted a little girl,” he says, and he doesn’t even realize he’s uttered it aloud until Tai flinches, taken aback.

“Well, now she’ll have two,” Tai says, recovering. “With Yang and all.”

Qrow slams down his glass. “Shit, Tai,” he mutters. “First time I’ve seen you how many years and I don’t even get a ‘how are you?’”

Tai throws his hands up. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. My girl’s giving birth in three days—my brain is a little occupied.”

“Ugh. Feels just like we’re back at Beacon.”

“What do you mean?”

Qrow narrows his eyes. “You’re irritating me.”

Tai claps a hand on Qrow’s shoulder, and if it’s supposed to make him feel better, it doesn’t. “Look, I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s just…I know how you are. Still. And I’m here. Really, it looks like you could use a little irritating.” 

“You don’t know what’s best for me, Tai,” he grumbles. He wishes he could just sink into the floor, disappear forever and finally forget that the only people he’s ever loved are all better off without him. “Gods, you sound just like her.”

“Let’s not bring Summer into this, okay? She’s at home, very pregnant, and can’t exactly defend herself.”

“You sure are proud of yourself,” Qrow responds, dryly, tracing his finger along the rim of his glass, distracting himself in the light glinting off the ice if only to keep from looking at his old teammate.

But he can’t. Tai is insistent, hands folded on the table in front of him, presence sturdy as a rock. Qrow looks up, and Tai’s attempts at playfulness are gone, his blue eyes dark. Serious. Qrow meets him with a raised eyebrow, but his expression remains unchanged.

“Qrow,” he says. “She wants to see you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TYSM for reading, as always. This fic has been so much fun to write...I'm going to miss it when I finish off these last two chapters.


	6. circulations 16-18

  1. _for every cynosure, a shadow on the wall_



Qrow feels like a ghost in Tai and Summer’s home. Everything is almost as he last saw it, when it was Tai and Raven’s, instead—the furniture hasn’t even been moved. But there are tiny touches of _her_ everywhere. White roses in vases on the windowsills. Yellow daffodils on the coffee table. A stack of fuzzy blankets in the recliner, topped with a slobber-matted stuffed elephant that can only be Yang’s. Every room he walks through reminds him of an illustration in a children’s picture book. Yet at the same time, something melancholy cloys at the air, spreading like smoke over sunlit walls. 

The source, he can only imagine, is himself.

Tai is about to lead him to his room—his and _Summer’s_ room—when loud, slapping footsteps fill the hall. Qrow looks up. Through the slots in the railing, he spots a tiny girl with blond pigtails on her way to the stairs.

“Careful, honey!” Tai calls up the stairs.

But his daughter is too eager. She barrels down the steps, nearly tripping before her bare feet find purchase on the first floor. Yang smiles at her father, her namesake, then looks quizzically at Qrow. He isn’t sure what to do beyond wave at her, this sunshine-colored rendering of his sister. 

Tai quickly gathers Yang into his arms. “You were supposed to be taking a nap, squirt.”

“I want to see baby sister,” she says, indignantly. She makes puppy eyes at Tai before turning them on Qrow. “Hi.”

“Yang, that’s your Uncle Qrow,” says Tai. “He’s going to be staying with us for a few days.”

Yang just waves, perfectly content with a second introduction. “Hi, Uncle Qrow.”

“Well, she’s outgoing,” he remarks, if half-heartedly. He’s still caught on her painful resemblance to her mother.

“Yeah, she’s already got _quite_ the personality—don’t you, little dragon?” Tai teases, tapping her cheek. She smiles, revealing a full set of shiny baby teeth, then buries her face in her dad’s shoulder. “Oh, we’re onto the second act, huh? Where you pretend to be shy?”

“No need to be shy around me, Firecracker. Me and your dad go way back,” Qrow says. He has to force the lightness into his voice, but Tai’s two-year-old doesn’t deserve to meet his cynical side.

Tai nods down the hall. “Summer’s in that last room, there. I’m going to make Yang a snack, give you two some time.”

“Thanks.” He doesn’t understand why Tai is being so accommodating, but he figures there’s no use pressing him about it, especially when he’s got an energetic toddler on his hands.

He heads down the hall. They’ve hung new pictures, he notices—mostly of Yang, or the three of them, but there are a few couple’s photos he can’t stand to look at for very long. Summer’s strawberry candles, none of them burning, clutter the accent tables. Everywhere she’s gone, she’s tried to make into a home, but this, here with Tai, feels final. Like this is her forever. 

Pain rises in his jaw, and he clenches to fight it, hoping a veneer of resolve will be enough to rebury his heartache. 

He stops at Summer’s room and steps into the threshold. She doesn’t notice him; her gaze is fixed on a wiggling, pink-wrapped bundle in her arms. The sight of her sitting there in the bed, hair full of the sun and fanned over the pillows, a baby tucked against her chest, stirs something strange in Qrow. It’s a warm feeling, but bitter—he doesn’t like the way it feels in his throat.

Still, he ventures closer. His boot lands on a weary floorboard, setting off a groan, and Summer jerks her head up.

Her mouth droops only a little, but her eyes, their silver almost white with the sun streaming in, stretch wide in surprise. The baby keeps reaching at her hair, grasping for attention, but Summer can only look at Qrow, frozen as he moves across the room towards her.

On his end, it’s easy as instinct. Always, he finds his way back to her side.

“Hey there, Quicksilver.”

Her perpetual response comes weakly, but with a lilt of relief. “I have a name, you know.”

He nods to her baby. “Does she?”

“Ruby.” She smiles, proudly. It’s enough to let him know the name was her choice, not Tai’s.

Then again, Tai _did_ name his first daughter after himself. Just like in their old days as a team, it was probably best to hand the decision-making off to Summer.

Qrow leans a little closer, just enough to get a glimpse of his niece—at least he hopes he’ll get to call her that. She’s hardly more than pink and wrinkles, her eyes still closed to tiny crescents, but he sees Summer in her already, in the perfect little button of her nose and the way she’s already grabbing at her mother’s hair, trying to get into things she shouldn’t.

That’s a good thing, he thinks. The world could always use more Summers.

“She’s got your nose,” he says.

“How can you tell?”

“’Cuz I can.” He twists his hands around in his pockets. “Why’d you name her Ruby?”

“Well, she’s mine and Tai’s,” she starts, “and she has _Raven_ hair.” With that, she brushes a finger through Ruby’s already very fuzzy head of black hair. It lays against her scalp in a pattern like tiny feathers. “So, I had to name her after you. Bring us all back together.”

“But I’m not…”

“Your eyes,” she says. “Ruby red. Just like that tattered old cape you wear.”

She lets out a breathy laugh, which sends Qrow twisting around to check his cape. When he looks back to her, he feels a blush running up the back of his neck—partly because she still knows how to embarrass him, and partly because of all the names she could have chosen for her child, of all the people who deserve to be that baby’s namesake, she chose a name that reminded her of _him._

Joy and guilt go to war in him. He doesn’t know what to say. _Thank you?_ he tries internally. _I love it? If she’d been our kid, like we talked about all those years ago, does this mean you would have named her after Tai? Tai’s ego is big enough—he doesn’t need two kids running around with his name._

He says nothing, instead opting to bite his tongue and school his face into something neutral.

But Summer sees right through it. “You don’t have to look so shy, Qrow. I meant that in a good way,” she says. “It’s a strong color. Bright, bold, passionate—it’ll protect her.”

“You believe that?”

“I think it’s worth believing in.”

Tension laces the air between them, only to be cut apart by a sudden cry from little Ruby. The sound makes Qrow wince. He’s a Huntsman, his line of work entails hearing plenty of screaming, but there’s something about the sound of Summer’s baby crying that sets his nerves firing in a panic.

Quickly, Summer gathers Ruby close, cradling her head against her shoulder. “Why are you crying, silly girl?” she coos, her voice high and teasing. She presses a kiss to her head, which seems to calm her a bit, then tilts her so Qrow can see her fully. His breath hitches. She really does look just like her mother—even when she’s crying.

“Look, Ruby. That’s your Uncle,” Summer says. “He’s kind of funny looking, isn’t he?”

“Hey, now,” he says, throwing up his hands in defense. He acts insulted, but really, her words ease him. She shouldn’t have to welcome him back the way she has, so quick to rope him back into her little family. But she has always been kind, forgiving. He’s not sure how a man like him could end up so close to her light.

Summer rocks Ruby gently, and her crying wanes into quiet newborn gurgles. Qrow steps a bit closer anyway, seized by some deep instinct to be close to them. To protect what he loves.

Then Summer turns to Qrow with one of her looks, the ones she’s been using on him since they were at Beacon, all soft lips and stunning eyes that he can never say no to, and holds a question behind her teeth. He tries to draw it out with a long gaze, a little pop of his brows, but she holds them in slow-burning silence.

He thought it’d be easier, after all these years apart from her. After hearing she’d gotten with Tai and had his child. After trying to drown it all out with whiskey and fights. He keeps his distance, he’d never cross a boundary, but her grip on him has never wavered.

If he’s going to be stuck in love with anyone until the day he dies, he supposes there could be worse people to fall for than Summer Rose.

“Do you want to hold her?” she asks, almost shyly.

Qrow hesitates. Glances down at his hands, then back at her. At Ruby.

“I…sure.”

“Here. Come sit on the bed.”

Tentatively, he lowers himself backwards onto the bed, plants his feet firmly on the floor. Despite his efforts to steady himself, his heart races as Summer stretches across the space between them and lowers Ruby into his arms.

He expects to feel a weight, but Ruby is so light and tiny, it’s like holding nothing but the air—that is, if air were _very_ wriggly. She relaxes within seconds, though, seemingly comfortable there in the bend of his arm. A smile fights its way onto his lips. She’s precious. That’s the only word he can think of to describe her, and he’s never been one for gooey sentiments.

“Hey, Pipsqueak,” he whispers to her.

“Don’t call her that,” Summer chides. “What if she grows up tall?”

“This tiny thing? Nah,” he says. “She’ll be pretty stubborn, though.”

He moves a finger to tap Ruby’s nose, but her little hand stretches up and grabs it, squeezing, and he can actually feel his heart going soft, like his ribs are about to collapse. 

“Oh, she’s got your finger,” Summer coos. “Is that right, Ruby? You love your Uncle Qrow?”

Ruby just keeps squeezing his finger. He takes it as a yes.

Summer inches forward beneath the covers and rests a hand on Qrow’s shoulder. The touch makes him jolt. The last time she touched him, it was to kiss him goodbye.

“Thank you for coming back,” she whispers.

Heat pricks the backs of his eyes. He refuses to cry, but the way Summer smiles at him, those silver eyes full of sadness and longing and the faintest little shadow of regret, makes it nearly impossible.

“I think if you hadn’t come to meet her, once I got to walking again, I’d probably go hunt you down myself.”

He laughs, dryly. “You know how I feel about you coming after me.”

“And I hope you know how many times I almost did.”

Ruby releases Qrow’s finger and shifts in his arms, providing a welcome distraction from Summer’s confession. She yawns, wrinkling her nose, and then her eyes flutter—once, twice—and open.

Qrow bites back a gasp. Ruby’s eyes are mirror silver.

He looks for Summer’s reaction, but her eyes have set on her daughter, her mouth pressed into a tight line.

“She’s got your eyes,” he says, and it stings on his lips like a curse. She didn’t want this. Looking at her now, the way the joy has leached from her face, he knows she still doesn’t.

“Can you go get Tai?” she asks.

He starts to hand Ruby back, but she pushes him away. “Take her with you.”

“Summer, you can’t…”

“Just take her and go get Tai. Please.”

He thinks about fighting her, making her hold her child anyway, but then she looks at him, tears shining in the rims of her eyes, and he tucks Ruby against his chest and walks into the living room.

Tai, who’s been sitting on the couch with Yang, bolts to his feet when he sees Qrow enter with his daughter.

“What are you doing?” he exclaims.

“She needs you,” says Qrow.

“Ruby?”

“Summer.”

Qrow lowers baby Ruby into her father’s arms. Tai whispers a frightened, “Oh my gods,” under his breath as Ruby stares up at him, blinking silver.

Then she bursts into tears.

“Here, hold her. Yang can usually get her to stop crying,” Tai says, voice cracking with worry. He thrusts Ruby back into Qrow’s arms and takes off down the hall.

Yang tugs on his cape. “Uncle Qrow?”

He pushes any thoughts of Summer in distress from his mind and sits down on the couch, rocking Ruby as gently as he can. Thankfully, she starts to calm as soon as he’s fit fully to the cushion.

“Uncle Qrow?” Yang pushes, again.

“What’s up, kiddo?” he asks, forcing calm into his voice despite the fact that he’s holding a baby and Summer is heartbroken and he has _no_ idea how to talk to two-year-olds who look just like his sister.

Yang is too young to sense his anxiety, though. She crawls forward on the couch and begins brushing Ruby’s hair with her fingers. “Hi baby sister.” She directs a smile at Qrow. “She’s so cute.”

“She is.”

Yang tilts her head and squints. “Where did you come from?”

“I’m a Huntsman, kid,” he says. “I come from everywhere.”

Her violet eyes go wide with wonder, her mouth dropping into an ‘o.’ “Everywhere?” she exclaims, and he tries not to laugh because her R’s sound like W’s.

“Yup,” he says. “I’ve been _all_ over Remnant, chasing down bad guys, picking off giant monsters—just regular Huntsman stuff.”

She nods along, but it’s still too much for her undeveloped attention span to fully catch. She goes back to petting Ruby’s hair, making up a song that’s mostly gibberish with a few notes carried on her sister’s name. Qrow glances at the hallway, expecting Tai to emerge at any second. Surely he wouldn’t leave a living bad luck charm alone with his daughters for this long.

But the minutes pass, and Tai is still with Summer. And Yang is still singing. And Ruby is still safe in his arms, eyes closed again as she drifts into peaceful sleep. When Yang decides to leave Ruby’s hair alone, he dares to brush a thumb over her delicate cheek—her eyelashes feather, but she doesn’t wake. He doesn’t understand. There must be some instinct buried within her tiny body, something that tells her he’s dangerous, yet this perfect little life he’s holding seems to _trust_ him.

She is every bit her mother’s child.

Tai comes back in looking ashen, arms crossed in a protective manner over his chest. “She wants to see Ruby,” he says. “I’m going to put Yang down for a nap.”

Yang pouts. “I don’t want a nap.”

“Well, you’re going to get real cranky in an hour if you don’t,” he responds, unrolling his arms. “Come on, I’ll read you the book about the dinosaurs again.”

Dinosaurs must be enticing, because Yang hops off the couch and makes a dash towards Tai. He catches her under her shoulders and hoists her into his arms, and with a high-pitched, toddler squeal, she grabs onto his shirt and smushes her face into his collar.

Qrow doesn’t know much about kids, but Yang _definitely_ needs a nap.

Adjusting Yang on his hip, Tai turns to Qrow. “Summer’s waiting for you two,” he says, and Qrow detects the thinnest current of frustration, maybe even jealousy, in his voice. “Easy with her, though. She’s hurting.”

_Like I need to be reminded,_ he wants to say, but he just nods and peels himself off the couch. He walks back to Summer’s room with slow, precarious steps, fearing he’s gone too long without a flare-up of bad luck, that it’s most likely to strike while he has Ruby in his grasp—it’s like he’s walking on a tightrope.

They make it, though. Summer’s cheeks are damp with tears, but she insists to smile as he comes into the room and returns her daughter to her arms.

“I think she likes you,” Summer says. She nestles Ruby against her shoulder and kisses her cheek. “Your uncle’s pretty cool, huh? Yeah, I think so too.”

He wishes she wouldn’t talk like that, like nothing happened and this isn’t their first day together after years apart—years where he left her, and she grieved him, and he missed her, and she _moved on._

Qrow steps away from them, adjusts himself against the wall. “Tai said you wanted to talk?” he asks, and Summer nods.

“How long are you here?”

“Three days, unless Oz calls me up and cuts it short.”

She pulls her face into a stern mask. “You can’t tell him.”

“About Ruby?”

“If he knows about her eyes, he’ll be watching her. Waiting to recruit her as soon as she’s old enough,” Summer says. “I just want her to be able to choose.”

Qrow comes closer. He wants to lay a hand on her shoulder, solidify his coming promise, but he hesitates, arm outstretched only halfway. “Don’t worry,” he says, though he fears his voice is at a loss for conviction. “He’s not going to know.”

“Are you sure?”

His hand falls on her shoulder, and to his surprise, she softens under his touch. “I’m going to do whatever I can to protect her. I promise.”

“I knew she was going to win you over,” she says, and her lips stretch into another smile he doesn’t deserve.

A cord goes taut in his chest. In another life, another forever, this same scene might play out with their own child in her arms. But the choices they’ve made in this one have led them here. They are near strangers now, hoping to settle for a different kind of love, cutting their own paths through thickets of uncertainty. It is not what either of them had wanted, but for now, it’s all they have.

He draws his hand from her shoulder, and calm settles over him. Tai and Summer deserve a gentle future, taking care of their girls, keeping each other strong. The best Qrow can do is throw himself against the shadows to protect them.

  1. _what was once lost, finally found_



A day after Qrow’s arrival, Summer is back on her feet, but the pain of childbirth lingers in her body. Soreness pulls from her stomach down her legs, a steady throb plaguing her hips. For the early part of the day, Tai offers his arm—and Yang _insists_ that hanging onto her leg will help—while Qrow offers only words of support for an evident fear of getting too close.

But by nightfall, she’s walking with only the slightest painful wobble in her step, and after putting Ruby to bed, she snatches the baby monitor from the dresser and sets off to find Qrow.

She peeks in the kitchen, _no,_ the living room, _no,_ the dining room, _also no,_ before making her way into the shadows of the foyer. Through the windows around the door, she spots a familiar cut of red draped over Qrow’s hunched shoulders.

She opens the door. Shuts it behind her. He doesn’t turn, but his shoulders straighten a bit.

“Stargazing?” she asks.

Now he pivots. With the shadows at his back, amber porchlight fills the facets of red in his eyes, turning them to fire. He isn’t smiling, or stoic, but somewhere in between, his lips closed in the smallest upward curve, and Summer’s ribs feel as though they’re tightening around her heart.

Why, after all these years, does every time she looks at him still feel like very first? 

His gaze tracks down her arm to the monitor in her hand. “Is that an old scroll?”

“No, Birdbrain,” she says, sighing, and the brief spell of seeing him is broken. “It’s a baby monitor. For Ruby.”

“ _Birdbrain._ Been a while since I heard that one,” he says. He stows his hands in his pockets and leans back against the railing, trying for aloofness—but she knows this game. “You sure you want to keep me around for two more days?”

“You weren’t thinking of flying away, were you?”

“I told you, Summer. I only leave if it’s on Oz’s call.”

The answer should satisfy her, but her braver side wants to keep pushing. “Have you ever told him no?”

He flinches—she bets he’s never even considered the thought.

“A job’s a job,” he replies. “Somebody’s got to save the world.” 

“I know. I’m still a Huntress, too,” Summer snaps. “Just because I’m not your partner anymore doesn’t mean I’m not still fighting.”

The words hover in the air. Neither of them has said it aloud, she realizes. That they’re no longer partners, or lovers, or even friends. But there’s a part of her that wishes they were all these things, and with him back, if only for a few days, their past has her mind in a stranglehold.

_I don’t love him,_ she tells herself, pinching her nails into her palms. _I don’t love him. I don’t love him._

If she says it enough, it has to come true. 

“I should’ve known,” Qrow says, shaking his head. “Nothing can ever keep you down.”

“Glad to know you still believe in me.”

“Of course I do,” he says. He steps off the rail, and Summer mirrors him. “I don’t want to talk about what I did. You’ve buried, I’ve buried it. But my faith in you hasn’t gone anywhere. I mean, look at what you’ve done for Yang. For Tai. I can only imagine all the things you’re going to do for Ruby. Whether you’re chasing down Grimm or raising a kid—gods, it’s like gardens grow from everything you touch.”

Summer takes a beat to gather her breath; his words have her on the verge of collapsing.

“I want you to be there for her.”

“What?”

Dropping the monitor in her dress pocket, she walks until their toes are pressed together and gathers up his hands. They’re cold from exposure to the late autumn night, but their familiar cuts and calluses, the smooth chill of his rings, flood her with comfort.

“Be there for Ruby,” she says, moving her gaze from his hands to his eyes. She sees shock in them, confusion—it’s the trust softening the corners that keeps her going. “She’ll need support, good role models. Yang, too. Just, don’t let this be the last time we see you, Qrow.”

He shifts his hands so that he’s holding hers, instead, his thumbs drawing gentle circles at her wrists. “Summer, listen to me,” he says, voice dropping. “I can’t be anybody’s role model. I’m not made for that.”

“You’re a good person. Is that not enough?”

Qrow hangs his head. “You’ve always been too generous with me.”

“Because you’re a part of this family,” she says. “Yang and Ruby are your nieces, and I don’t want you to be just some faint memory to them, some sad thing tugging at the back of their minds—I want them to have all of us. I want them to have everything we didn’t.”

“Is that your way of telling me not to die?”

“You know I’ll kick your ass if you do.”

He lets himself laugh, and it’s a shot of daring, warm and unexpected, that makes her drops his hands and wrap her arms around him. She’s never forgotten the way they fit together—as he pulls her in against his chest, the contours of their bodies align in heartbreaking perfection, her cheek pressed to his speeding heartbeat.

_I don’t love him._ She squeezes her eyes closed _. Not anymore._

His hand cups the nape of her neck, and the memory of that same hand tracing the many paths of her scars, knotting her hair when they kissed, cuts all her hopes of resistance.

“I’ll be there,” he whispers, leaning close to her ear. “Whenever they need me, I’ll come around.” 

“What about when I need you?”

She swears she feels his lips brush her temple, but that could be just a memory, too. “You won’t, Munchkin,” he replies. “But I won’t be a stranger.”

Then he separates from her and heads back inside, leaving her only with the wind to sting away the shadow of his warmth.

Summer has to take a few breaths, steel herself against the porch rail, before she follows.

Happy voices carry down the hall from the living room. When Summer enters, Qrow is sitting cross-legged on the floor, Yang half-hidden beneath his cape. Tai, hovering by the couch, snaps a picture of them.

Summer’s lips split in a grin. “Tai, have you seen Yang?”

“Nope, not at all,” he says, matching her smile. “I’m just trying to get a detail shot of her Uncle’s cape.”

They all laugh, and Yang throws up her arms, lifting the cape. “Hi, Mommy!”

“There you are!”

Summer stretches out her arms, expecting Yang to run to her. Instead, she circles Qrow and jumps onto his back.

“Easy there, kid,” he says, grabbing her wrists to keep her steady. “You’ve got to give me a little warning.”

Joy fills her. She can’t count how many nights she lulled herself to sleep with scenes just like this one, where her family is happy and safe and _normal_ , with little ones climbing all over them. But there is an imperfection. A vacancy. A striking sort of silence.

Raven should be here, too.

She knows her best friend, the closest thing she ever had to a sister, is gone. But she thought Qrow was, too, and now he’s here just feet from her, bright-faced and laughing as Yang dangles from his shoulders, babbling in his ear. Maybe there is hope for Raven, then. Maybe if Summer keeps the windows open, one day, Raven will come flying through.

It wouldn’t be easy, at first, now that Summer and Tai have taken up together, had a daughter. Still, Summer knows they’d make sense of it. Strangeness means little when you’ve always been stranger than most.

Qrow glances up at her, giving her the softest of his smiles. This is an image from an old dream, too. Where it was always them in the end, their own children in their arms, their own forever spread before them. And her chest smarts because they could’ve had it. All he had to do was stay.

_I can’t love him. I can’t,_ her better reason tells her. _But I do, I do, I do._

  1. _the coda, as refrain in a higher key_



Summer counts her supplies three times—for good luck—before packing them up for a mission.

Today’s list begins with twenty dust cartridges for Cress. A week’s worth of ration packs. A canteen, her name scratched into the metal belly. Extra shoelaces. Her hunting cloak, freshly cleaned and still warm from the dryer, ready to be worn.

She slides Cress and Lune into her belt, pulls the cloak over her shoulders, and checks her eyes in the mirror. Their silver is sharp, determined. It’s been years, long before Ruby and Yang were born, since she took a mission with these kinds of stakes. But she’s ready. She has to be.

Ruby is two, now. Yang is four. Ruby has been slow to start talking, so Tai tries to train her on the easy words, and Yang sings the ABCs over breakfast. Tai does most of their cooking, now, and Summer takes on the baking. Tai’s also adopted her old gardening habit, and now the outside of the house is as full of life as the inside—sunflowers and roses are his favorites. And when Qrow comes to visit, when he lets the girls chase him around the yard and cling to his legs, he takes the blossoms from the bushes and sticks them behind their ears.

These are the things she wants to remember. These are the things that will keep her strong.

Qrow has been compromised. They got the notice from Oz early in the morning, sent more as a courtesy than a call to action. But Summer wanted details, and she took them in like mission data. Location: Sanus. Enemy: Servants of Salem. Class: Grimm and Human. Huntsman Status: Compromised.

Oz told her she had a choice. She knew she didn’t.

Tai is still cleaning up the kitchen when she’s ready to set off. Normally, he hums to himself while doing chores, but this morning he’s coldly silent, his brow furrowed as he works the burned bits out of a pan.

Summer sighs against her nerves. “Taiyang.”

He turns. Shuts off the water and dries his hands. He looks at her like he’s mourning her.

“Summer,” he starts, edging closer. “You don’t have to do this.”

“I do.”

“There’s a hundred other Huntsmen who could take this job, ones who don’t have a partner and two kids waiting at home for them,” he counters. “Why does it have to be you?”

_Because he’s family. Because the girls love him. Because_ I _love him._

“Because you aren’t the only ones who need me.”

Tai’s face twists. “What?” His voice breaks, and guilt spears Summer’s chest.

“I’m a Huntress. This is my job,” she says, firmly. “You of all people should understand that.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t. Not this time.”

“Why not?”

“Summer, this isn’t like when we were kids. We have a life together, now—a life those girls upstairs are dependent on.” He gestures in the direction of the stairs, emotion making his words waver. “Why do you want to risk it like this?”

“Why are you acting like I’m going to die?”

“Because you could!” he cries. “Because every time you go on a mission, you could die.” He pauses, collects his breath. “And this…I’m not stupid, Summer. This isn’t just any other mission, and it feels…it feels like you’re leaving us for him.”

The guilt stinging in her heart spreads outward, clamping like a cage over her ribs. Of course that’s where his mind would lead. He’s seen the way Qrow dotes on Ruby, the way he steps in to help Summer whenever he visits, the way their fond familial glances turn too easily to lingering stares.

After Raven, Tai would know better than anyone the warning signs of falling apart. 

“I know things are complicated,” Summer says, trying her hardest to be diplomatic, to keep her guilt out of her voice. “But I can’t stay here and let him die. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”

Tai drags a hand down his face. Pauses a long moment with his mouth covered, gaze stuck to the floor. It feels like the whole room is suffocating them.

He lowers his hand, and he has to work his jaw a few times before the words come out. “Summer, do you even love me anymore?”

His question is an accusation, one that Summer is wholly unprepared for despite the obviousness of it—once Qrow came back, decided to keep coming around, she knew she would have to answer this sooner or later. For Tai, and for Qrow, and for herself.

It should never hurt to love someone. But nothing hurts Summer more than knowing she loves Tai—wholly, deeply—but not the way he needs her to.

She swallows, fighting a sudden tightness in her throat. Heat teases her eyes. “Tai. I love you,” she professes. “And I love Yang, and I love Ruby. You are my family, and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure those girls grow up safe and strong.” Tears fall down her cheeks, betraying her heart. “I just have to do this first.”

“You’re still in love with him.”

_Yes. I am. I’m in love with Qrow Branwen, and if I let him die, it’s going to be heartache for all of us._

“I’m not leaving you. Or those girls.”

His whole body sinks. “Is this what you want? You want to put everything we’ve built on the line for a man who forgot how to love you? For someone whose semblance nearly got you killed?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Summer cries. “You weren’t there, you don’t know—”

“Dammit, Summer. The guy was like my brother,” Tai says. “I know what he is. You know why he doesn’t stick around too long, never spends too much time around the girls. He’s a _curse,_ and he knows it, too. You really think that’s your happy ever after?”

Summer rolls her hands into fists at her sides. Her heart feels empty and raw, but if Tai pushes anymore, the void will start to fill with anger. “Don’t you dare call him that.”

“Forgive me, Summer, for being angry that my partner wants to leave me and our _children_ to go running into danger for her high school sweetheart.”

“If it were Raven in his place, would you go after her?”

This shocks him. He takes a step back, resets his face. “I…”

“You would. And I wouldn’t want anything else,” Summer says, adding, “I still love her, too.”

“That future we talked about when we were younger—it’s gone, Summer. They ruined it for us,” he says. “So we made our own way.”

“I know. But the girls don’t need to lose any more family,” she says. “I’m going to get Qrow out of there. And when we’re back, we’ll all talk, and we’ll figure it out.

“Will we?”

“Yes!” she exclaims. “We always do.”

She crosses what feels like miles between them and pulls his face into her hands, studies those sad blue eyes that have looked upon her with nothing but admiration, that have watched their daughters grow and seasons change, that have dimmed and darkened with sorrow. When Summer looks at him, she sees a soul much like hers—for its simplicity, its kindness, but also for the fact that it belongs to someone else.

Her kiss is chaste, but not unfeeling. It is gratitude, and love, tinged with a finality that cuts them both. She closes her eyes and wishes things were different, that they really were made for each other, instead of temporary cures for the other’s broken heart.

The steps to make things right will be perilous, but she has to take them. If only to be at peace with herself. 

When she breaks off the kiss, tears are shining on his face, and she rubs them away with her thumbs. “I’m going to say goodbye to the girls.”

It isn’t until she’s halfway up the stairs that she lets herself cry, too.

She finds the girls in their room, Yang leading them in a game of pretend with stuffed animals and baby dolls. Ruby is the first to stop playing and spot her, and even though she smiles, Summer’s heart cracks at the sight of those tiny silver eyes. 

Yang sets down her toys. “Mommy, where are you going?”

Summer comes into the room and kneels on the rug. Ruby toddles right into her arms, but Yang just watches her.

“Why are you crying, Mommy?”

“I’m going on a mission, baby,” she says. “I’m crying because I’m going to miss you.”

Yang crawls across the floor to embrace her, and Ruby taps at her face, comforting her the only way a toddler can. Summer kisses each of their foreheads, then their cheeks. She wishes there were a different way to do this. But she’ll be home, soon. As she embraces them, she tries to envision coming home after the mission, the two of them running to meet her, squealing with delight because she’s got their favorite Uncle in tow.

They _will_ make this work. If they’ve lived this long with all the odds against them, this is nothing but another bump in the road.

She draws her finger along the bridge of Yang’s nose. “I love you, my little Dragon.”

“I love you, Mommy.”

“You take good care of your sister, okay?”

Yang nods emphatically. “I will.”

Then Summer turns to Ruby, her miniature, and all her attempts to stop her tears from flowing fail. Ruby babbles something that sounds like “I love you,” and Summer brings her close. She’s running low on time, but this isn’t the end. She’ll come back, and she’ll give them enough hugs and kisses to last a week.

“I love you, too, my sweetest Petal,” she whispers. “Be strong for me.” 

A rumble sounds above, shaking the house, and Summer’s heart drops into her toes.

“That’s my ride, girls,” she says. “It’s time to say goodbye.”

She rises, and the girls grab hold of her hands, gripping tight as they make their way down the stairs and to the front door. Summer can see Tai is already on the porch, bracing for goodbye.

The airship, small and silver and built for stealth, shudders to a landing on the front drive. Summer takes a deep breath, then lets go of her daughters’ hands to give Tai one last embrace. When they separate, he scoops and Yang and Ruby into his arms, and Summer gives them each a kiss on the cheek.

“See you soon,” she says.

“Be careful, Summer.”

“I’ll do my best.”

She starts down the porch steps, and the girls call after her, an overlapping refrain of “I love you,” and “Bye, Mommy!”

Summer turns over her shoulder, waving back to them. “I’ll be home soon! I promise!” She blows them kisses, and the girls blow them back. “I love you!” she cries.

Then, because she has no other choice, she yanks up the hood of her cloak and steps into the airship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's the penultimate chapter! The finale will be a long way off, though, since I've got midterms and whatnot. However, once it's all done, I'm thinking of giving it the old Charles Dickens treatment and editing it post-serialization. Or something. Anyway, as always, thank you so much for reading!!!


	7. circulations 19-21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is, guys—the end. I’m going to add a disclaimer that this fic has always been about characters making bad snap decisions, thinking with their heart first, being forced to confront the weight of choice. This is not a happy chapter. They make mistakes, and people die, and those who live are burdened with guilt and regret. But there is still hope—while writing this, I’ve wanted hope to always be the undercurrent.  
> To those of you who have been here since the beginning, thank you for coming on this journey with me. I hope I made you feel something. Thank you so much for supporting my work, and enjoy this final chapter.

  1. _smoke from others’ fires_



Mazarin Adesius is known as the Hellraiser. After decades as Salem’s favorite puppet, his body is more Grimm than human, black rivers carving through what little skin remains. He keeps one eye—the human one, presumably blind—covered with soiled strips of bandage, the other left to gleam infernal red. The color matches the handle of his battleax, and it’s all Qrow sees when Mazarin slams the blunt end into his face.

His aura is waning—it can do little to counter the pain. As he staggers backwards, blood pours from his nose, staining his teeth. He swipes his hand across his face, and a low growl rumbles in his throat.

“Dirty move, Maz,” he grinds out.

He slings Harbinger forward. Maz halts it with his axe, and sparks dance, nicking their faces. As Qrow pushes back, Maz flashes a deadly white grin. His greasy hair lops over his Grimm eye, cutting it to slits.

“Are we getting tired, little birdy?”

Qrow grunts. His lower lip fills with blood. “Your breath smells like shit.”

Maz unlatches his weapon from Qrow’s and makes a swing at his waist. Qrow evades it, throwing Harbinger back into the axe just as Maz tries for another blow. They volley a moment, then Qrow catches him on an underhand swing, and Harbinger rips through the sleeve of his coat. Black Grimm shadows writhe where the fabric tears, latticing his arm in a makeshift cast. Maz risks a beat to adjust his grip, and Qrow seizes on it. He slashes for his throat but hits his face instead, shearing the bandages apart and drawing a line of crimson through his cheek.

His human eye is not blind, but unmistakable, seeing green, now running over with red.

Qrow has crossed a dangerous line. Face split with fury, Maz rears back for another hit, angling the axeblade towards Qrow’s shoulder. He’s just fast enough to avoid having his arm sliced off—but Maz still manages a shallow slash down his arm. It’ll scar, but it won’t slow him down.

Their weapons lock again. It’s more like a dance, now, contrived of messy, pain-drunken steps, whirling out of the clearing and into the forest. The rhythm breaks when Maz slams Qrow back against a tree, jostling his grip on Harbinger. It stuns him, stars whiting out his vision. As they clear, fury lances through him. He grunts, chokes back a battle cry, then wrinkles his lips and spits a mouthful of blood onto Maz’s face.

Disgusted, Maz staggers back. Qrow’s blood dissolves on his Grimm skin, but sticks in sickly spots to his human complexion.

Maz licks his lips, and dread strangles Qrow’s stomach. He knows what’s coming. He’s fought this creep before, and while Maz using his semblance signals he’s losing strength, it could be endgame if Qrow can’t replenish his aura.

_Where are those damn reinforcements, Oz?_

Qrow moves on him again, and Maz bounces backwards, hides himself in the trees. “Here, little birdy,” he trills. “ _Heeere,_ little birdy.”

Qrow stays frozen. Now isn’t the time to start a chase.

Then, Maz whistles. A high, grating peal, like steel being dragged against concrete. Qrow clutches one ear to block it out, but he’s less concerned about the whistle than what comes after it.

Maz’s semblance is his Dog Whistle. Unlike most semblances, it’s strongest when he’s weakest, and when he uses it, he can summon nearby Grimm to protect him. Qrow shaved off most of them by the time Maz arrived, but in woods this thick, you never know what’s lurking in the shadows until it’s breathing down your neck.

The trees waver, spraying their leaves. Somewhere among them, Maz’s cackle echoes. Living shadows rise above the treetops and unfold into the forms of giants: Seraphae Grimm, the angels of the dark. Three of them sway on their bone-slender limbs, taking thunderous steps towards the clearing. Red eyes cover their arms, their legs, their long, orb-like faces. Bone-plated wings, too heavy for flight, cling closed against them as shields, making their backsides impenetrable—save for a thin ribbon of vulnerable shadow down the spine.

Qrow locks Harbinger into scythe form as the Seraphae encroach upon the clearing, eclipsing the waning sun. He needs to move, but fear solders his feet to the ground. He can’t take down three Seraphae like this, not with his aura whittled so low. His only options are run and burn out, or drop to his knees and surrender.

_Not how I thought I’d go out,_ he thinks to himself, staring up at the Seraphae before him. It blinks its hundreds of eyes at once, and Qrow flutters his own in answer. Breathes. 

Then a point of silver blooms at the top of the middle Seraphae’s head and streaks down through its body, cleaving it in two perfect halves.

Qrow manages a tighter grip on his weapon. “What the…”

The halves fall like the opening of a curtain, and his jaw comes unhinged. Standing before him, white cloak swirling around her ankles, is Summer Rose.

+

Looking at Qrow, Summer doesn’t know whether smile or sob. He’s alive, thank the gods, but he’s covered in blood, his shirt all but torn to shreds. Still, his cape hangs triumphantly from his shoulders, that valiant red swaying at his hips.

His mask of distress eases into a weary smile, and Summer steps towards him. The Seraphae frays to midnight dust at her feet. 

“You came just in time,” he rasps.

Summer mirrors his smile. “I know.”

The ground quivers. They both look up. The remaining Seraphae are lumbering towards them, swinging their clawed, mangled hands like wrecking balls.

Summer tightens her gaze, studies their movements. It’ll be hard, slicing them down to what her eyes can cover, but she’s pretty sure she can take them on her own. She slings Lune back in its holster and converts Cress into gun form. The Seraphae converge behind her, pouring their shadows over her and Qrow, and she pivots.

“Gather your aura,” she says, holding her free arm out over his chest. “I can handle this.”

She fumbles at her belt and pulls a blade of concentrated fire dust—one of her new upgrades, just shipped from Atlas—from a pack at her hip. She holsters it to the top of Cress.

“You like my new toys?” she asks Qrow, flashing her weapon over her shoulder.

“I love them.”

Summer aims Cress and poses her finger on the trigger. “Me too.”

She pulls the trigger. The dust blade ejects and spears clean through the first Seraphae’s leg. Severs it. The Seraphae stumbles forward, clawing for her, but she slides out of its reach and takes out the other leg with standard bullets. As it falls, she steps forward and tosses back her hood, removing the shade from her eyes.

She closes them. It’s always Ruby she sees, first—her precious little red. Then Yang, interminably cheery, glowing under the sun. Tai, who she loves. Raven, who she still aches to have by her side.

Qrow is the heaviest on her mind, though, so it’s the image of him standing guard at her back, wind-whipped and battle-weathered, that brings the fire to her eyes. Her power cuts the Seraphae in cauterizing silver, needles of light threading shadows into stone. In its weakened state, only a short burst is required to petrify it, but she still suffers a kickback, leaving her blinking the heat from her eyes and struggling to gain her footing.

A hand splays across the small of her back to hold her balance, and a pleasurable chill puckers her skin. She throws a relieved smile over her shoulder. “Thank you, Qrow.”

He nods. “I’ve got you.”

The last Seraphae charges for them, bony wings fully fanned, eyes glaring. Qrow and Summer take hold of their weapons and share a look of fierce accord.

“I’ll take the left,” she says.

“I’ve got the right.”

Then they bolt towards the Seraphae. She and Qrow haven’t done this combo move since their Beacon days, but they hit it with lightning precision: they pirouette through the air, scabbards and scythe spinning in violent unison, and bring the last Seraphae to the ground. When it falls, Summer buries a blade of explosive dust in its neck and blasts it to oblivion.

Qrow’s gaze meets hers through the storm of dust that follows. His brows are lifted slightly, his lips upturned—it’s a softness, a _fondness,_ she’s not expecting in the wake of a fight. It makes her heart clench. They could’ve always had this. The rush of battle, followed by the rush of each other.

She never should have let him go.

Nearby rustling pulls their attention. Maz staggers out of the trees, into the night that swirls in fragments around the three of them. Summer and Qrow, still catching their breath, aim their weapons.

“Hey, angel,” Maz slurs. His eyes are on Summer. “Missed seeing you around.”

“Can’t say it’s mutual.”

She senses Qrow move closer. “Summer, take it easy.”

Maz leers at her, dragging his axe along the earth, but no matter his posture, Summer is unafraid. He’s falling apart, and she has the barrel of Cress pointed between his mismatched eyes.

She moves her finger over the trigger.

“Summer,” Qrow pleads.

“Do you trust me, Qrow?”

Maz picks up his axe and swings the blade in a figure eight. An hourglass. “She’s going to find you, angel. She’s going to pluck your pretty little wings.”

Summer swallows thickly. Her finger quivers at the trigger.

“One by one, feather by feather,” Maz says, head cocked to the side. “He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not…”

Qrow replaces the wind at her back. “I trust you.”

Her doubt shrivels, and she pulls Cress’s trigger and snaps her eyes shut.

When she opens them a second later, Maz’s knees are hitting the grass, his axe slipping from a limp right hand, his head tipped and hiding his wound. The Grimm part of his body peels into black dust before he even hits the ground.

Summer turns her back on what remains of him. Qrow, standing hunched, eyes glazed with pain and shock, seems to have lost hold of his own weapon.

She slides Cress into its holster and steps towards him. They share a breath, eyes locked, the last hesitation. Then she throws her arms around his waist and he folds her against his chest and fully entangled, they sink to their knees.

For a moment, they simply cling to each other. Hands wrap in capes and trail over spines, frantic heartbeats press together. Qrow turns his face into her cheek, nose against her jaw, and she shudders as his sighs ghost down her neck.

His fingers find their way into her hair, beneath the coil of her bun, and he pulls away, but only to cradle her head and behold her. As his eyes search hers, she finds herself taking stock of the cuts and bruises on his face. She would do the same when they were younger, when they were still partners, and lovers. When she could bring their bodies together and kiss away the pain.

“Oz was an idiot to send you after me,” Qrow says.

Summer shakes her head, tired laughter thrumming in her chest. “He didn’t send me,” she says. “I volunteered.”

“Of course you did.”

“I just didn’t know what I’d do, if you died, I’d…”

“Summer, it’s okay,” he says. He leans his forehead against hers, and she can’t cage a gasp of surprise. “You did it. I’m here. We’re safe.”

She places her hands on his neck and closes her eyes, allows herself to revel in their closeness. This will not last. But for now, holding onto him, feeling his breath on her lips, she’ll let herself dream.

+

“Did the stains come out?”

Summer makes the last fold in her cloak and sets it on the windowsill. “For the most part,” she answers, smoothing her skirt. “I’m glad they had baking soda down in the kitchen. That always does the trick.”

Qrow shifts on the bed across the room, adjusting himself against a mountain of extra pillows. He’s cleaned up since they got to the inn, his wounds covered in gauzy bandages, but his aura is still low.

Summer ventures closer, eyeing the wrap around his arm—and steering her gaze from his bare chest. Inkblots of brownish-red have seeped through the layers of gauze and dried it stiff. “We should change that one,” she says.

“No, don’t worry. My aura can take care of it,” he says, giving his arm a slight jostle. “You should rest.”

“I’m fine,” she insists. She proceeds to the dresser and assesses her supply. Among extraneous things, there looks to be enough gauze to rewrap his arm, and a nearly full bottle of antiseptic. She takes a few stray cotton puffs and the bottle in her hands and moves them closer to the bed. “Let me help you.”

He closes his eyes, relaxing into the pillows. “Sure. Patch me up.”

“Quick to surrender, are we?”

“Uninclined to argue,” he says. “Big difference.”

Summer rolls her eyes and sits down on the wedge of open mattress. “Here. Give me your arm.”

He obliges. She takes his elbow in one hand and unravels the bandage with the other, hoping he’s too tired to notice the unconscious trembling in her hands.

“How does it look?”

She peels off the innermost gauze, revealing a jagged rift of red. “Better than it did,” she says, squinting. The dim table lamps in the inn room don’t offer much light. “Could use some cleaning up, though.” 

“Take it away, Doc.”

Summer stifles a giggle as she tosses the soiled bandages and grabs her supplies off the nightstand. When Qrow returns his arm to her grip, she realizes she’s moved closer—her hand closes around the back of his upper arm. She’s not sure where it stems from, this intense awareness of the bridge made between them, but it’s fogging up her mind, cluttering her focus with unwanted memories and Tai’s searing words from this morning.

_Do your job, Summer. That’s what you came here for._

She wets the cotton. Cool antiseptic touches Qrow’s skin, and his bicep flexes taut—she feels it, the subtlest of motions, but it brings a sharp breath through her teeth.

Qrow lifts his free hand and winds it around wrist. “Summer, are you sure you’re okay? You’re shaking.”

“I think I’m just cold,” she rushes. “Don’t worry, I’m almost done.”

He rubs her arm before taking his hand away, and in her mind, she curses him for being so gentle. She always loved the way he handled her. Not like she was fragile, or small, but like her power was precious—he wanted to feel her strength in his hands. Against his lips. Under his frame. 

Fighting a shiver, she grabs a clean roll of gauze and begins to wrap his wound.

“How are the squirts?” he asks.

“You’re going to eat your words when Yang is taller than you.”

“Well, she’s not yet.”

“The girls are good,” she finally answers. She starts another layer with the gauze. “Growing up way too fast, but they’re happy, healthy—Tai’s a good dad. Things are okay.”

“That last one didn’t sound too convincing.”

She dips her head, the thick shadows from her bangs hiding her features, and ties off the end of the bandage. “My missions are hard on all of us, now.”

“I get that.”

“I was wondering if you would come home for a while, after the mission,” Summer starts. She works her fingers at the hem of her combat skirt, pulling tiny strings out of the lace. “To us, I mean. On Patch. The girls keep asking when you’re going to come back.”

“Well, that might be in the cards,” he replies. She senses him lean closer, and every muscle in her body draws tight. “Hey. What’s wrong?”

“I’m tired.”

“Look, if this is about what Maz said, about Salem finding you,” he starts, and Summer finds she has no strength to resist when he pulls her wrists forward, spooning her hands in his palms, “she won’t. I’m not going to let that happen.”

He delivers a new fear she didn’t want, but in an odd way, she welcomes it. A second problem to divert her from the first. For everyone, she thinks, sometimes fear can be comfortable.

But it grows quickly, ice branching through her chest and up her throat, until at the turn of a thought, it is consuming.

“We’re going to have to face her one day. That’s what this mission is all about,” Summer says, half to her own consolation. “I’m just so worried about my girls. I don’t want them to have to face what we have.”

Qrow strokes her hands with his thumbs. “They won’t have to. That’s why I keep fighting.” He pauses, mulling in the tension wrapping the air. “Summer, look at me.”

She raises her head. His gaze is intense, bright, promising—it burns through the ice that overtakes her.

“When Raven left, it was because she wanted to protect herself. Nobody else,” he says. “But when I left, it was because I wanted to protect the people I love. I hope, after all these years, you can understand that.”

“I do.”

“And I hope, too, you know how much I missed you,” he continues, though his voice falters with an apparent rush of nerves.

Summer’s thoughts leave her lips before she can catch them. “You never had to leave.”

Qrow nods, solemnly, and Summer moves even closer. “Look at how we fought out there tonight,” she says. “It’s like we never spent a day apart.”

“We got lucky.”

She releases one hand from his to fiddle with the cross that gleams at his collar. “You finally figured out how to work this?”

They both laugh.

Summer lets go of him, pushes her hair back out of her eyes. “You know, I still want to hear all of your hero stories. I’m sure Ruby and Yang would, too,” she says. “You wouldn’t believe how much they love you, Qrow.”

“You’re right—I probably wouldn’t,” he remarks, playfully. “I guess I should come visit, then.” 

“And stay? Please? At least more than a week.”

“I don’t know, is Tai going to let me hang around that long?”

The mention of Tai douses her little flicker of joy. Her shoulders drop, her features ironing into a sullen mask. Her voice gets low. “I broke his heart, coming after you like this.”

“What, why?”

Summer’s heart crimps with guilt. “Qrow, we’re…he and I…”

“Wait, he doesn’t think…”

“That I’m still in love with you?”

Qrow flinches, heartbreak smeared across his face. “Are you?”

“I am.”

Then there is silence. Bloated, heavy silence, stitched tight with threads of guilt and regret and a love that should have died long ago. Yet it lives. It _blooms,_ unfolding and filling up her chest, petal by petal.

She raises a shaking hand and rests it against his cheek. He leans into her touch, his brow softening, and she sees forever in the red horizon of his gaze, a dream she’d given up on, reignited.

“I want to be your partner again,” she says. “If I don’t get to love you, at least let me fight with you.”

Qrow sets his palm over her hand, but doesn’t peel it away. “You know there’s more at stake here than just you and me.”

“Tai knows,” she says. She tears her hand away, but only to sate her urge to wring her fingers. “I just wanted to be honest with them. That’s what they deserve. No secrets, no hidden pain—I mean, that’s what I tore us all apart in the first place. And I know you think you can’t be around us, can’t be around _me_ for too long because you think you’re a curse, and Oz lets you believe it, but _dammit,_ Qrow, those girls need you. I need you. I’m never going to love anyone the way I love you. I tried, and I can’t. So, maybe I don’t get to have you like that again, maybe all I get is to look at you across the living room and wish that everything was different, and Raven was still here, and Ruby had a sister who was _ours,_ but at least you’d be there. At least I could stop missing you that much.”

Qrow sighs, deeply. “You done, short stuff?”

She swallows, shame scorching her cheeks. “I’m sorry.” Tears wet her eyes, but she won’t let him see them. She gets up and moves for the window, reaching to gather her cloak. She’ll take a walk, get something to drink, maybe call Tai and tell him he was right and that she’s sorry, that Qrow really did forget how to love her after all.

But a hand on her shoulder stops her. “Hey. We’ve got to talk about this.”

She whirls. Qrow doesn’t let go. “I should leave you alone,” she says.

“I don’t want to be alone.”

The stark sincerity in his voice makes her tremble. He trails his fingers over her shoulder to cup her neck, runs a thumb along her jaw. “If we fight together,” he starts, “you have to know that you’re putting yourself in danger.”

“I put myself in danger every time I’m in the field,” she says. She glimpses their phantom reflections in the dark window panes. “But you and me together? Against them? We’re just as dangerous.”

He nods. Steps closer. “We are.”

“When I fall,” she says, resting her hand on his arm, “will you promise catch me?”

“I promise.”

“And when I’m hurting, will you carry me home?”

He tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear. “Every time.”

Bravely, she takes hold of his face and tips it down towards hers. Their voices sink into whispers. “You’ll have my back—”

“—and I’ll have yours.”

Summer lifts herself onto her tiptoes. Their foreheads bump, then their noses. She closes her eyes, and Qrow relaxes into her, weaving his arms around her back.

“I’ll be your partner again,” he says. “Wherever you want me, however you need me, I’ll be there.”

They lean in together. She’s never forgotten what it felt like to kiss him, to feel his fire wrap its way through her body, burning through all their years apart. There is no hesitation in his kiss—only certainty, which becomes passion, which becomes desperation. His tongue coaxes apart her lips, and she sighs, twisting his hair around her fingers.

He lifts her onto the windowsill, and she throws her legs around his hips, dragging him closer, _feeling_ him. As he dips to kiss her ear, then her neck, she pulls her hands down his bare chest, caresses every scar. There are new ones, raised and knotted, but the old ones she remembers.

He leans away to glimpse her just before her hands reach his belt. She doesn’t mind—she’s perfectly content to just look at him, bask in the moment of having him back. Shadows pool in the contours of his face, but his eyes are full of light. He is so unbelievably beautiful. How did she ever breathe around him? How did she let him get away?

“This is such a bad idea,” he mutters.

“I don’t care.”

He pulls her in for another furious kiss, and selfishly, she returns it. In the morning, she’ll regret this, jumping so quickly into him after letting Tai go, but right now, she needs the release, the numbing stupor of adrenaline only he can give her. Their kisses get sloppier, too much spit and the occasional graze of teeth. She only wants more—she’ll keep being selfish, just a little longer. 

When she leans back to catch her breath, Qrow gives her a moment, then his lips find her neck again. A column of heat races down from her chest.

“Qrow, close the curtain.”

He tugs it closed behind them, sending her cloak spilling to the ground. She pays it no mind and kisses him again. Slowly. He grips her thighs beneath her skirt, and the touch sears right through her stockings.

“Just know that if you take off my dress, I don’t look the same as I used to,” she says against his lips. 

His fingers stop at the waistband of her tights. “Doesn’t matter. You’re beautiful,” he murmurs. “I love you so much, Sum. I never stopped.”

Her breath hitches. She knew—she could feel it in the way he kissed her, that same love he gave her all those years ago, now older and wiser and _stronger._ She grabs his face and pulls him in again, and again, saying _I love you, too,_ with every eager movement of her lips.

Everything makes sense this way. That red-eyed boy in the Emerald Forest, her opponent on the rooftops of Beacon, her very first love—it would always be him, in the end.

She kicks off her boots. He peels off her tights. The zipper at the back of her dress tugs down, and his hands spread over the bare expanse of her skin, relearning her.

“Summer,” Qrow whispers, lips to her ear, “are you going to regret this?”

“No.” Her bodice slips off her shoulders. “I’m choosing you.”

She drops off the window sill, and her dress falls and pools at her feet. There is a flicker of uncertainty, a silent space between frantic heartbeats, where his gaze roves her, reverently. Then he takes her hands and leads her forward, into him, and she can’t imagine ever looking back.

+

They’ve made a mistake. He knows it by the guilt making knots of his stomach, the sweat cooling on his forehead. But Summer is sleeping so peacefully on his chest, he can’t bear to move her.

Instead, he draws invisible swirls on her back and shoulders and listens to her breathing. He keeps thinking he’ll wake up and it’ll all have been a dream, that there’s no way fate would put her back in his arms like this, no way she’d choose him again. But every time he closes and opens his eyes, she’s there, hair mussed and sticking to her forehead, long lashes fanned over her cheekbones, so perfectly herself.

Tai must be heartbroken, though, and that’s what keeps him from joining Summer in sleep. He’s going to kick his ass when they get back to Patch. A punch in the nose, at the very least. And he’ll deserve it.

He doesn’t regret this, though—he wasn’t even sure he was going to survive the day, let alone end it with Summer coming back to him. For now, he’ll take all the luck he can get.

After a while, she stirs again, silver eyes blinking open. “Hey.”

“Hey there, Munchkin.”

She stretches a bit, holding up the sheets to cover her chest, then moves up beside him on the pillow. “Have you slept?”

“No,” he admits, though he kisses her forehead to sweeten it. “Been too busy staring at you.”

Summer tips her face into his shoulder, and he feels her smile against his skin. “That was so bad,” she mutters.

“Was it?”

“Oh yes,” she says, looking up. “That was teenage Qrow levels of bad.”

He rolls his eyes. “So now you want to get on my case again, huh?”

She presses her lips to his, but guilt pricks him again, and he can’t return her kiss. “I had this crazy idea,” she says, not sensing his hesitation.

Still, the sleepy eagerness in her voice makes him chuckle. “What idea? You fell asleep right after we—” Guilt once more, even sharper. “—we should talk about this.”

Summer settles into the pillow. “We probably should.”

He swallows, hard. _Might as well get the tough questions over with._ “So. You and Tai. Did you…”

“…break up?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know what to call it,” Summer confesses. She stares up at the dark ceiling; the fan turns in a slow rhythm. “Part of me thinks yes, part of me—well, part of me is just kicking myself because I think I just did to him what you did to me.”

“Well shit, Summer.”

“I’m going back, though. I would never abandon Yang and Ruby,” she says. “I just told him you were coming with me.”

Qrow flinches. “Wait, what? Summer, that’s not going to go over very well, I mean…”

She tenses at his side. “I said we’d talk everything out,” she says. “I only want to do what’s best by my girls, Qrow. I want them to have their dad, and Tai is _such_ a good dad, but he and I weren’t going to last, not the way we should’ve. We miss our birds too much.”

“Raven isn’t going to come back, Sum.” 

“What if she did?” Summer protests. “What if that was my idea—to go get her back?”

He tosses his head. “What?”

“Think about it. The three of us, we go together, we get her to come back. Maybe that’s what she’s waiting for. For us to show her we care, that we still need her. You know your sister, Qrow. She always thought she had to do things alone, but we were there, we were all there and she was at her best when she let herself lean on us.”

Qrow can’t wrap his mind around it. Raven left her husband and child because she was selfish, because she bought into their mother’s lies about strength. But true strength is right here, lying at his side. The light Raven turned from was not Oz, or the mission, but Summer, the orphan girl who wanted nothing more than to be a hero. He cannot imagine there is anything brighter than her.

“You’ve always loved too much, Summer,” he says. “I’m so scared it’s going to kill you.”

She bristles under the covers. “Maybe it will. Maybe I do love too much, too quickly. But I’d rather it be that than to hate everyone until they whittle away at my heart,” she says. “If it makes you feel better, though, when I first met you, I thought you were a total self-righteous asshole.”

“That was your intuition, and you should’ve listened.”

She jabs her arm into his rib. “Stop that,” she says. “Even if I did hate everyone, you know you’d be the first to win me over.”

“I don’t know, Ruby’s pretty adorable…”

Summer rolls back onto her side, a luminous smile breaking across her face. “You are so soft and gooey,” she coos. “You’re like…a sexy marshmallow.”

_A sexy marshmallow? Now, she’s delirious._ He plants a kiss on the tip of her nose. “I think you should try sleeping again, Princess.”

“I’m going to put my dress back on,” she says, lifting the covers. “Do you want your pants?”

“Do you want me to want my pants?”

She steps across the room and pulls her dress up to her hips. “I am indifferent.”

“You are a real piece of work, Summer Rose.”

A ripple sounds in the air, and a wad of fabric smacks into his chest. “Your choice.”

Zipping up the back of her dress, Summer returns to the bed and perches on the edge of it. “We’ll need to head out early tomorrow, get somewhere with a little more civilization. We should be able to hail an airship there.”

“Sounds like a plan.” 

She stares at him over her shoulder. Dim lamplight lays across her features, smudging deep shadows under her eyes. Her lips, he notices, are still slightly swollen from his kiss.

“What is it, Summer?” he asks. _Do you regret this, after all?_ his thoughts follow.

“I just miss my girls,” she mutters. “Is that silly? It’s only been a day.”

“It’s not silly when you love them.”

Smiling again, she falls back into the bed and fits her head on his shoulder. He pulls the covers over her shoulders and closes his eyes. Finally, the need to rest is overtaking his worry.

“We’ll go home tomorrow?” she murmurs against his skin. “Together?”

He seals his promise with a kiss on her cheek. “Together.”

+

An alarm skips through the pre-dawn silence, rousing Summer from sleep. She wrenches up and pulls away her covers, though she waits a beat, just to ensure the wailing sirens aren’t leftover noise from a dream. They’re not. Adrenaline shoots through her veins and sends her to her feet. She leans over the bed and shakes Qrow, who grunts into his pillow.

“Grimm,” she tells him. “Get up, get your weapon.”

He’s still buttoning his spare shirt as they jog out of the inn and into the bleeding-ink shadows. No other sound joins the banshee wail of the siren, and the stillness brings an unwelcome chill to Summer’s skin.

“You think it was a test?” Qrow asks. Harbinger is in his hand, already half-extended.

“No,” Summer says. “I can feel them. I feel…something.”

She squints through the near dark, scanning the inn driveway, the woods that swallow it. Something rustles. She slides Cress into her palms and aims.

“Summer?”

“Spot me.”

“Always.”

The trees part—the brush is trampled. A deadly cloud of shadow and bone and fire charges towards them, limbs writhing and entangled. Summer’s heart leaps into her throat. This is not a stampede of Grimm, she realizes. It is a dark chimera of them, heads and horns protruding from one bulbous, twenty-legged body.

Qrow fires on it first. The bullets merely irritate it—it tosses a few of its many heads. Summer gropes at her hip for her dust blades, thinking an explosion will throw it off, slow its course. But she’s left them inside.

“If I slow it down, can you go after it?” she asks. Even in the shadows, she can tell his face has paled with worry.

He nods. Harbinger lances into scythe form. “On it.”

She holsters Cress and thrusts her open palms into the air, bathing the Grimm chimera in mercury silver. As its legs leaden and drag, Qrow leaps into action. He jumps forward, driving himself into the Grimm with sharp, precise slashes.

He only makes so much progress before the Lunar year wears off. Summer takes both blades in her hands and swings, shearing strips of pitch off the creature’s body. Qrow volleys at the back, severing legs and heads. Overhead, the siren wails on with abandon. 

Summer doesn’t know who makes the fatal cut. She slices through a thicket of shadow, and then dust is whirling around her cloak, and Lune is locked stiff against Harbinger.

Qrow smirks at her, and if only a by a notch, her nerves ease.

She pulls her sword away, breathing heavily. “Would it be foolish to hope that’s the only one?”

Qrow points to the sky, where the alarm continues to screech and stutter. “If that’s any indication, probably not.”

Summer takes a deep, preparatory sigh, closing her eyes to refocus. When she opens them, a sporadic shimmer pulls her gaze back to the woods, over Qrow’s shoulder.

A hundred red eyes hang in the air like will-of-the-wisps.

She draws Cress and Lune again, readjusts her stance. Reading her, Qrow grips Harbinger’s handle and turns around. The eyes, menacing sparks, flicker.

“What do we do?” Summer asks, half to Qrow, half to herself.

“Pick off as many as we can and make a run for it?”

“That’ll work.”

They proceed cautiously towards the looming wall of Grimm. Summer knows she’ll have to use her eyes, again. Qrow does, too. That’s why he’s hovering so close to her, just a few steps from shielding her completely. That, and because just after getting her back, she knows he’s probably afraid to lose her.

He won’t, though. They’re Huntsmen—they’ll save the day before it even starts.

Strangely, as they near the wall of Grimm, they don’t move. Only blink, watching them. Qrow holds Harbinger out as bait, the gunmetal curve of his scythe a moon against their red-flecked night. Summer expects the shadows to grab on, snakelike arms winding over the steel, but there is only stillness, and blinking, and the siren slightly filtered by the trees. 

The Grimm stir, rustling branches and snapping twigs. Qrow takes a step back, and Summer gathers up her thoughts, funneling them to a precise point behind her eyes. Their opponents inch forward, just enough to make their white bones visible. Discordant growls burble in their throats. Then the Grimm pool together, skulls and eyes and armor eclipsed by an infinite shadow that slumps against the earth like a fallen curtain.

“The hell is that?”

Summer gulps. The shadow drills downward, red eyes waking before stretching into long, burning rivulets and swirling into a whirlpool.

No, not a whirlpool. A portal.

“It looks like—” she starts, but doesn’t finish. Qrow knows what she’s thinking; she doesn’t need to sting her lips with it.

“Let’s go.”

They arc back towards the inn, pumping their arms, but Summer makes it only a few steps before shadows shoot out of the portal, curling around her calves like brambles. She screams. Qrow reaches out to her, but the darkness catches him, too. He falls, face colliding with the earth.

Summer reaches for his hand, but before she can grasp it, the portal devours them.

+

Under an eternal, bruise-red night, a dying tree clings to its last hanging fruit. Summer awakens sprawled beneath it—she bats her eyes, letting blurry shapes come into focus. Her aura took the brunt of her fall, but there’s a dull soreness in her bones when she tries to turn over. As she levers into a sitting position, hands pressed to unfamiliar, violet stone, the fruit falls from the tree. It bounces and rolls, and Summer’s gaze follows it until it stops at Qrow’s hip. He’s on his hands and knees, eyes on the ground.

Summer exhales his name, and he glimpses her. He stands, if slowly, and crosses to offer her a hand.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

She cinches her fingers around his wrist and rises. “Are you?”

He nods, and they look around together. Behind them, a jagged terrain of dark stone stretches into the horizon—and before them, a cliff rises towards the sky, its slope chiseled into the arc of a crooked staircase. Speckles of gravity dust bob in the air, the icy wind pooling them in tiny nebulas.

“Where are we?” Summer asks.

“I have a guess,” he says. “But I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

Summer counts the details again, and her stomach wrings with fear. “We aren’t in Remnant anymore, are we?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“How do we get out?” she asks.

Qrow turns his face to the undulating sky. “I don’t know,” he admits. “Maybe there’s a portal somewhere.”

“And we’d just have to trust that it leads back to Remnant?”

“That may be a risk we have to take.”

A figure protrudes suddenly from the top of the cliff. Summer doesn’t know if she walked there, or simply appeared, but the sight of her sends a cold wave of shock through her body.

_Salem._

Oz’s holograms could only barely capture her frightening visage. She floats down the curling staircase, her chin held at a pompous, condescending height, shadows dithering at the hem of her dress. Sharp jewels—red, yellow, and black—dangle from the ribbons that scaffold her hair. When she finally turns her Grimm-veined face down to glimpse them, her irises shine furious red against pits of black.

“The sword and the spy,” Salem croons. Her fingers dance lazily, calling sparks of crimson magic. “What a surprise, to see you’ve strayed this far.” She lowers her brow and crushes down the magic in her hand. It pressurizes into something sharp. “Has he finally let you down?”

Qrow and Summer look to each other—a vow of silence.

“I know you killed Maz. I was watching,” she says. Her bloodred stare falls on Qrow, and Summer seizes up, resisting the urge to make a scene of stepping in front of him, guarding him. “I relished every moment of your pain, seeing him rip you up, cut you down. But, little roaches you are, you got up. You won. That’s when I knew I had to take you both for myself. I just didn’t think that day would come so soon.”

She points her blade of crimson magic between Qrow’s eyes. “You. You’re the favorite.”

“The hell are you talking about?”

Salem floats closer, and Qrow throws Harbinger lengthwise between them. Merely annoyed, she spins her blade into liquid and lets it twirl down her arm, settling around her wrist like a luminous serpent. Then she clamps her nails into Harbinger’s metal—a threat.

“There’s always one of you. His prodigal son, his like-minded soul,” she coos. The magic slithers back up her arm and over her hand. Qrow wrenches Harbinger away before it can reach the scythe’s deadly curve. “He told you that you could be a hero, didn’t he? And you believed it.”

“Oz saved me.”

Salem sneers. “Oz damned you.”

The magic in her hand rots to black, fringed in violet. She swirls it, making concentric, gyrating rings. A cry dredges from her throat, and she throws the curse forward. Summer lunges for Qrow, but it’s too late. The blast hits him in the center of his chest, and he goes skidding across the dirt unconscious. Darkness lingers over him, wraps around his limbs like a straitjacket.

Summer runs for him. Tears scald her eyes. _No, not Qrow. Don’t let me lose him._ At his side, she falls with a violence to her knees, ripping open her stockings. She tries to touch him, but the shadows tighten, squeezing a pained gasp from his lips.

Blood burning, she whips around towards Salem. The dark enchantress waves her fingers in a gesture like goodbye, and Qrow’s binding tightens again. Summer’s face contorts in rage.

“You can’t save him, little Reaper,” Salem taunts.

Summer’s body quivers, but her grip on her scabbards firms. “You don’t know what I can do.”

She leaps from the ground and tears off towards Salem. Salem simply waits for her. With the wave of a hand, she casts a wave of red light and draws it around her, making a spherical shield that pulses like aura. Summer’s anger blinds her to the odds. Her body becomes controlled, precise fire, slamming metal into magic.

Salem backs away, up the stairs, and Summer chases her. Each time she drives her blade into her shield, she wails. Salem’s monsters took her parents, lured away her best friend, and now she’s taken Qrow. 

But Summer can defeat her. Ozpin told her that her power made her special, that she had a gift that could bring about the end of the war.

Qrow’s life, should he die, will be the last she takes.

She and Salem rally to the top of the cliff. Summer swirls the dust dials on her weapons, trying ice, fire. Tiny breaks scatter across Salem’s force field, shearing it to ribbons. It continues to dance around her, but there are gaps, vulnerabilities.

Salem catches her watching. She rends the magic back into her hands, draws it into the shape of a massive blade. Summer throws herself at it—but Salem’s hit is stronger. She goes soaring back towards the stairs. Aura cradles her, shuddering red over her body, and she jumps back up. Fits her legs into a fighting stance.

“Why do you do it, Salem?” Summer cries across the distance. “Why do you let your creatures wreak havoc on our world? Why do you let them kill us?”

“Because I can!” she shrieks. “Because I can kill, and you can _die_!”

Then she stalls. Laughs. It’s hollow, haunting, a triptych in a vast, empty hall. Her hands quiver, ever so slightly, and her sword breaks and falls like neon rain. “Isn’t that something?”

Summer doesn’t care to ponder her. She sprints across the promontory, Cress held abreast of her. _Now or never, Summer—now or never._ Focusing her strength to her arms, she trusts a current of bravery to carry her and makes a stab towards Salem’s unguarded heart.

It lands. Summer’s breath chokes out in a gasp. She blinks, just to be sure. She’s sure. Her blade has plunged clean through Salem’s heart and out her back. In any second, she’ll crumple. Bleed. And it will be over. At Summer’s hand, a thousand sacrifices will gain new meaning.

But Salem stays perfectly still. Perfectly calm. Her eyes are half-lidded, not with pain, but a knowing, unsettling serenity.

“What?” Summer asks, but the question fades to the wind.

Salem’s hands clamp onto Cress’s blade. She cackles, chest stuttering and twisting around the sword that’s speared it. Magic pours from her hands, causing Summer to lose hold of Cress and jump away. As she steadies Lune between both palms, Salem pulls Cress from her body and grins at the blood that oozes down the metal. 

Summer can’t think anymore. She submits herself to instinct. Vengeance guides her blade into her other as Salem wields, it wrongfully, eyes thinned with malice. Cress and Lune lock and grind, and Salem uses the friction to torque Summer in the other direction, driving her steps towards the cliff’s steep drop. Summer just keeps pushing back.

“Stubborn little girl,” Salem says. “All your years at his precious academy—didn’t he ever teach you when to give up?”

Summer digs her heel into the rock. “No,” she says, “and if he had,” she brings Lune down the length of Cress, drawing a screech of sparks, “I would have never learned.”

Salem pulls back and hits with greater force. Summer holds on; her grip on Lune is iron-tight, but her strength in her legs is slipping. Every muscle strains in her upper body. Salem’s hits come harder, dark magic bolstering the blade. Summer resets her stance—

—but her ankle twists, tendon snapping, and Salem bats her over the edge.

The pinches her eyes shut as she falls. She does not think about dying. She thinks about her team, her daughters, the life that stretches on ahead of them. She tries so hard to be happy, but as she hits the pool at the bottom of the canyon, all she can think about is her failure.

The Grimm welcomes her—she makes a soft landing in the darkness. Viscous black runs over her body. Her lips part, and it snakes into her mouth, down her throat. She is surrounded by death, a substance that moves to greed and spite, and yet life clings to her. Needling her veins, piercing her chest, simmering beneath her closed eyes, life demands to be felt. To burn. Her second soul awakens, and she is blinding, radiant, _invincible._

She opens her eyes, and silver rips apart the dark, carrying her up, up into the light.

High above the edge of the cliff, she rises. Wings of white light have burst from her back, her eyes dangerous stars, beacons against the night. Salem, trapped on the ground, begins to wither.

Summer floats down and tiptoes over the rocks, shoulders pushed back in triumph. “You won’t win this, Salem,” she says. “I’m going to take you down. And then we will cull every one of your Grimm that remains, until there’s nothing left for our world to remember you by. They’ve already forgotten your name.”

Night-sky violet bleeds from Salem’s hands, bundling in a dark womb before her hips. “Huh. How noble of you.”

Summer closes her luminous eyes and thinks of Qrow, and Tai, and Raven, and her daughters, the warmth and joy she’s seen in them, the boundless, powerful life. It is her ammunition. Her sword. When her eyes flutter open, they will purify Salem to dust.

Salem pitches her darkness forward, and Summer reopens her eyes. The last thing she sees is Salem, cowering beneath her light, before the curse clamps onto her chest and wraps around her, a serpent made of smoke, constricting. The tendrils freeze her, crawling up her neck, her cheeks, reaching the waterline of her eyes. Already, they begin to cool. _No, no. Not when I’m so close._

The light sinks out of her eyes, her wings turn to dust—darkness gnaws apart the warmth in her veins. Summer calls to it, her second soul, but it has already died.

It’s hopeless.

Pain shreds through her body. She can feel herself unwinding, skin ripped from muscle ripped from bone. She grits her teeth, blood and spit bubbling behind them, but she will not scream. Will not close her eyes. If she is to die, she will do it as a mirror to Salem’s destruction, her tired eyes reflecting her monstrous form. Maybe then she will see the terror she’s wrought, painted in the shadows that scar her face. Maybe then, she will choose to repent.

Summer does not hate her, though, even as she strips her life away. Somehow, instead, she mourns her. Life is small. Life is precious. What a tragedy it is, to waste it in wrath and hatred.

Summer’s mind burns with one final wish, wrapped up in the image of a little girl with silver eyes, surrounded by a family that loves her: _Please, let her remember me—may my memory shine on her better tomorrows._

Then the mirror breaks, and into the unending night, she scatters.

  1. _we are always beginning and ending_



The first thing Qrow feels is an arm across his chest, hoisting him out of the dark.

_Summer?_ he tries to say, but his voice can’t quite push out the words, as if those shadows are still wrapped around his throat. His savior grunts. Ribbed armor digs into his skin. No, this is not Summer.

With his sister’s name, Qrow’s voice returns.

Raven drags him forward. He hears her sword come unsheathed, the rush of it arcing through the air. _Must’ve been some mission, if_ Raven _had to come to the rescue._

His eyes snap open. He can see nothing but the whirling red of one of her portals, glaring like a nefarious eye.

“Raven,” he slurs again. “Where’s Summer?”

She stiffens. Says nothing. He writhes against her grip, but she just pulls her arm tighter, restraining him.

“Where is she, Raven? Where is Summer?”

“I just gave everything for you,” she says, and she shoves him headfirst into the portal.

+

Qrow awakens to a face full of sopping grass and mud, rain beating down on his back. Moaning, he rolls himself over to meet a puddle of ash gray sky, framed in swaying treetops. A bird caws, then flies away, the stirring of its wings joining a clap of thunder.

He blinks, stringing memories in beaded fragments. There was the chimera, the portal, Salem, darkness, Raven. But Summer was there. Summer was going to save them. He looks around, and he is alone. He cries for her, again and again, but only his echo and lightning answer.

If she couldn’t kill Salem, if Raven had to save him, that could only mean—

—his fist slams against the earth like a gavel. He screams, straining his throat, tears making hot streaks down his muddy face. It can’t be. Summer was stronger than him. She was always stronger. She should’ve stayed home, she should’ve stayed with Taiyang, she should’ve let him just _die,_ and everyone would be better for it. He falls back into the mud. It feels like the end of everything, without her. The world is burning and the fire is cold and his body is brittle light breaking under the impossible darkness of grief. 

Summer is gone.

She’s _gone._

It should’ve been him. This was all his fault. He should avenge her, take his life by his own hands, but he already feels close to dead, as though half his soul has been ripped out of his chest. He should have known he could never keep her safe. He’s always been a curse. And now he’s damned the world, stealing away its greatest hero with his own selfish recklessness.

She wouldn’t want this, though. If she were here, she would kick him in the ribs with her ratty old combat boots and tell him to get up, to go to Tai, to do what his sister and couldn’t and be a part of a family.

As he pulls himself to his knees, he thinks of Yang, tugging on his cape. A memory of Ruby, the spitting image of her mother, smiling and reaching for a backyard wildflower, brings him to his feet. He attaches Harbinger to his back and wills himself to push on through the rain, against his grief.

He’ll do this for them. For Summer, if only to honor his promise. _I want you to be there for her. Be there for Ruby._

He goes. One long, impossible step after another, he goes. 

+

“She’s not coming, Tai.”

Tai sways on his feet. Works his jaw, but no sound comes out. Qrow must look like a revenant to him, his body caked in blood and dirt, his posture dragged down by grief. He wonders if Tai even knows it’s him.

“What do you mean?” Tai asks, finally, his voice a bloodcurdling kind of quiet. His fingers tense against the threshold—it’s the only thing holding him up.

“She’s gone,” he rasps. _Just say it, you coward._ “She’s dead.” 

Tai’s grip on the doorway gives, and he collapses. Qrow winces against the cry that comes from him, the way his pupils fill his eyes and freeze before his face crumples and tears leak down his cheeks. 

“I hate you,” Tai spits, smearing his hand across his face. “I fucking _hate_ you.”

Qrow looks up from him, stifling the hurt. He never should’ve expected Tai to want to grieve with him. He’s getting the hatred he deserves, and he’ll take it like a lashing—dutifully. Repentant.

But then two little girls toddle into the living room, hand in hand, and he almost breaks.

“Daddy? Uncle Qrow?” Yang asks, and at the sound of her high, piping voice, Qrow feels his jaw begin to quiver.

Tai rises, glances over his shoulder. “Yang, Daddy and Uncle Qrow have to talk right now,” he says. “Go to your room with Ruby, okay?”

Yang just tilts her head. “Daddy, why are you crying?”

“Just go Yang. Please.”

Yang, so young but still keen to the tension, tightens her grip on Ruby’s hand and takes her up the stairs.

Tai turns back to Qrow. His blue eyes, now bloodshot, are narrowed with rage. “How did it happen?”

“Salem.”

He drags his hand down his face again. “What the _fuck_ , Qrow? Salem?” he exclaims. “That’s who you were fighting?”

“I wasn’t…”

“She went after you! She left _me_ for you!” Tai shouts. “And for this? A battle that was _impossible_ to win?”

“Tai, if you’ll let me explain…”

“I don’t want to hear it. I know what you did. And I will never forgive you,” he says. “Now get out.”

“Taiyang, please. How do you think I feel?”

“I hope you feel horrible. I hope you _rot_ ,” Tai says, seething, his shoulders heaving with fury and grief. “Get out.”

Qrow steps back from the door and lets Tai slam it shut.

_I’m sorry, Summer._

He turns and descends the porch. Before he reaches the woods, he spares one glance back at them before flying off into the storm and taking his misfortune far away.

  1. _from silver ashes, silver bullets_



Eleven times, Remnant travels its sun. Four-thousand fifteen times, the sun arcs and sinks across the sky. One-hundred-thirty-two times, the moon spins from whole, to shattered, to whole once more.

Spring warmth comes late to Patch this year, with winter’s chill lingering in brushstrokes of heavy wind. In just a week, Qrow will welcome a new class of students for his third year teaching early combat at Signal Academy. The job was a near miracle, the result of Ozpin pressuring him to clean up his act and Tai finally extending the olive branch. There is still tension—he and his old teammate still wouldn’t call themselves friends again. But Tai knows Qrow has a promise to keep, so he lets him come over every now and then, if only to see his favorite nieces and have a decent meal or two.

Ruby is thirteen, now, and she wants nothing more than to be a Huntress. He’s been training her on the basics, at first to Tai’s dismay, but it works for all of them. Tai, after all, has been Yang’s primary coach—as well as her homeroom teacher—at Signal. Training her reminds him of why he does what he does, why even after he lost Summer, he keeps fighting. Someday, Ruby might have to join him on the battlefield. He tries not to think about that, but it creeps into his thought some nights, usually alongside his last memories of Summer.

Ruby and Tai have been building her weapon. She won’t let Qrow see it—says it’s a surprise. But when she bursts out of the house for training today, there’s a cardboard box in her arms and a bright, familiar smile on her face.

“The last piece came in!” she exclaims from the back porch. “I’ve got to go put it on!”

Qrow, who’s been twirling Harbinger through the air, stills it in his hands. “You need any help, kiddo?”

“Nope!” she exclaims. Her silver eyes crinkle. “This one’s easy.”

She darts back inside, leaving a rush of rose petals in her wake. The manifestation of her semblance—enhanced speed, the opposite of her mother’s—is new. They’re still adapting to it. Ruby, however, isn’t much for the patience of adaptation. Just like her mother, she’s prone to rush into things head first.

Normally, when Qrow thinks of Summer, he drinks. Cries, but only on the worse nights. Ruby, however, makes him think of her and smile.

When the back door opens again, it’s Yang who comes out of the house. She looks ready to train with her Dad, her hair swept up into a golden ponytail. Qrow would never tell her, but she still reminds him so much of Raven—though fortunately, it seems she inherited her father’s kinder heart.

“What’s going on, Firecracker?” Qrow calls to her. “You don’t have an appointment with your old man?”

“Ruby’s trying out her new weapon,” Yang answers, matter-of-factly. “Someone has to prevent collateral damage.”

“Yeah right, Yang!” Ruby’s voice trills from inside the house.

Ruby bursts through the door, and Qrow nearly gasps. Her weapon is a near replica of Harbinger, only the curve of the scythe is painted in brilliant red, her namesake color—her very own good luck charm.

Excitedly, she shakes the handle. “Uncle Qrow, meet _Crescent Rose._ ”

He beams. “I love it, Ruby.”

“Do ya?”

“I do,” he says. “You picked a good one.”

She assumes her battle stance—which is, typical of her age, unrefined—across from him and adjusts her fingers around the weapon’s long handle.

Qrow marvels her. Ruby is more than just a whisper of her mother. She is her own bright, beautiful shout, full of more hope for the world than it deserves. She will be a hero, one day. That eager smile alone should be enough to save them all.

Gods, Summer would be proud of her.

Qrow takes his own place across from Ruby, and for a fleeting moment, watching her bouncing on her toes, ready to spar, he finally feels lucky again. _I’ll be there for her Summer. No matter what comes our way, I’m going to protect this little girl with my all._

“Uncle Qrow, come on! Let’s do this!” she exclaims.

“Okay, Pipsqueak,” he tells her. “Show me what you’ve got.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed, and stay tuned for circulations 4-6, where sh*t's about to get REAL


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